Medicine based on evidence tends to focus on the biological body, irrespective of the cultural background of the person whose body it is. But nursing or medicine ...whether practiced as an art or a science does not exist independent of culture. The need for intercultural 
communication keeps proping up its head in the practice of evidence based medicine.
The need is never clearly seen when the practitioners and patients share a common culture. But when there are enormous cultural differences between them, the practice of medicine can become compromised or even end up lethal.
Transcultural communication is an art…an art fraught with pitfalls, especially in the medical arena! And when health care providers and patients talk to each other via a cultural divide, the challenges they face to establish an effective cross cultural communication can be intensified if social, economic, or language differences are also involved! The best intentioned statement or action can be misinterpreted by one or the other and disrupt their attempt to communicate or derail it completely. I have seen this happen many times as a medical worker in many German clinics.
I have also witnessed many caring, well-meaning, and intelligent European medical practitioners due to ignorance and sometimes fear of the unknown, deeply offend many foreign patients and thus hinder their acceptance of modern medical health care.I have witnessed and still experience many patients with foreign cultural backgrounds, trapped in their own cultural boundaries, infuriating and alienating well-intentioned health care providers to the point that effective treatment and therapy became less frequent or even stopped temporarily and budgets for special services event reduced to the lowest minimum.
We have witnessed each group bitterly complain about the other as the lousy cross cultural communication between them started…and sputtered…then stalled…time and time again. Professional experiences have taught us that people do insist that medicine be practiced holistically. A holistic medicine is one that doesn’t ignore the mind of the patient, which includes all those thoughts, feelings, and perceptions which are conditioned by cultural influences.
The demand for medical practitioners to take these cultural perspectives into account in their practice of medicine will continue to exist as long as cultural diversity does! Modern health care providers will need to refurbish their intercultural communication skills, especially when practicing in areas where there is more cultural diversity.
