2014 - Culture and health (original) (raw)

The Lancet, 2014

Planned and unplanned migrations, diverse social practices, and emerging disease vectors transform how health and wellbeing are understood and negotiated. Simultaneously, familiar illnesses-both communicable and non-communicable-continue to aff ect individual health and household, community, and state economies. Together, these forces shape medical knowledge and how it is understood, how it comes to be valued, and when and how it is adopted and applied.

Culture and Health - Lancet Commission (member of scientific committee)

CHAPTER 2 Culture , Behavior , and Health

2018

People around the world have beliefs and behaviors related to health and illness that stem from cultural forces as well as individual experiences and perceptions. A 16-country study of community perceptions of health, illness, and primary health care found that in all 42 communities studied, people used both the Western biomedical system and indigenous practices, including indigenous practitioners. Also, there were discrepancies between which services the governmental agencies said existed in the community and what was really available. Due to positive experiences with alternative healing systems and shortcomings in the Western biomedical system, people relied on both (Nichter, 2008; Scrimshaw, 1992). In recognition of the widespread use of nonbiomedical therapies, the U.S. National Institutes of Health established a center for the study of alternative and complementary medicine, which is now called the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH, 2014). With a y...

Chapter 5: Culturally Based Health and Illness Beliefs and Practices Across the Life Span

Journal of Transcultural Nursing, 2010

I. INTRODUCTION A. The purpose of this chapter is to anchor health care within the context of the ethical responsibilities of health care providers to deliver quality care to people from diverse personal, cultural, social, and global contextual backgrounds. 1. These ethical responsibilities must go beyond the assimilation of cross-cultural and linguistic knowledge, competence, and sensitivity. 2. An appreciation of and willingness to learn individual, family, cultural, and social group perspectives regarding health and illness is required. 3. Providers must be willing to engage patients and their families in assessment, dialogue, and negotiations regarding patients' and providers' explanatory models (Ems; Helman, 2000; Kleinman, Eisenberg, & Good, 1978, 2006) and health and illness representations (Farmer & Good, 1991). B. Health beliefs are formed and health practices are enacted within the context of everyday life. 1. Beginning at the time of birth, people learn and assimilate their perspectives regarding health and illness within their cultural and social worlds. 2. This learning becomes internalized and is gradually modified throughout their lives as a result of their experiences, formal and informal education, and their interpersonal relationships. 3. Bronfenbrenner (1995) describes this as a gradually evolving developmental process based on a culturally defined age, role expectations, opportunities, and the timing of the person's life course. Within this context, individuals engage in a mutual accommodation between their internal beliefs and an ever changing external environment (Bronfenbrenner, 1995; Bronfenbrenner & Ceci, 1994).

Culture and Health : A Wider Horizon

2015

ola sigurdson culture and health in research and practice culture and health at the university of gothenburg conceptualising culture conceptualising health how can we research culture and health? the intrinsic value of culture; the intrinsic value of health artS and health gunilla priebe and Morten sager the arts as health-promoting link between body and Mind the arts as creative complement to traditional health services Negotiations on the relationship of the arts to science and Evidence arguments on scientific legitimacy arguments on the scientific legitimacy of the arts arguments on utilisation of the arts summation of boundary work in arts and health arts and health: the confluence of Epistemological ideals and applications of Knowledge MediCal huManitieS Katarina bernhardsson the three orientations of the Medical humanities Medical Education research in the Medical humanities activities in the Medical humanities the Future of the Medical humanities SCholarly perSpeCtiVeS on Culture and health FroM the uniVerSity oF gothenburg daniel brodén Medicine and health care society and living conditions the humanities, art and culture a Multidisciplinary Future? editor'S aFterWord ola sigurdson bibliography Monographs, articles and reports digital resources university centres, Networks and projects Journals author biographieS indeX ForeWord pam Fredman, vice-chancellor, university of gothenburg CULTURE AND HEALTH. To my mind, these two words belong together. As a new field of research, Culture and Health most definitely belongs to the future, regardless of whether the focus is on prevention to maintain health or intervention to rehabilitate and promote healing. Culture and Health is an innovative area founded upon an interdisciplinary perspective. It encompasses many exciting opportunities-the only boundaries to what can be studied are those set by the limits of our imagination. There are also many challenges, especially the fact that the field is young and relatively unfamiliar to a wider circle. Achieving success in an entirely new area of scholarship such as Culture and Health will take time, patience, a long-term approach and serious political action. In order to lay a stable foundation with new interdisciplinary structures, researchers from a variety of established scientific and scholarly disciplines must come together across disciplinary lines and be stimulated towards novel thinking and ideas. Only this will make possible that which has occurred in other fields, such as gender studies and environmental science, disciplines that did not exist until fairly recently. Today, they are accepted fields of academic research. Although Culture and Health is still unfamiliar to the general public, the field has relatively quickly become a matter of great introduCtion to Culture and health ola sigurdson WHAT IS CULTURE AND HEALTH? This book is intended to answer that question from several different perspectives. In this chapter, I will lay out the background of Culture and Health work in Sweden. I will begin by providing a picture of the history of the field in practical Culture and Health activities and in academic research, after which I will define the concepts-what we mean by 'culture' and what we mean by 'health' when we talk about Culture and Health. A field like Culture and Health has a history which, although brief, determines what the field has become. At the same time, the field depends upon clear definitions so that its workpractical or theoretical-does not degenerate into random fumbling. Considering the broad meanings of both terms, culture and health, it then becomes important to ask how it is possible to study Culture and Health-a question that will be discussed in greater detail in the next three chapters of the book. Thereafter, and finally, I will not only discuss the intrinsic value of culture, but also the intrinsic value of health. Although these are questions whose existential span is far beyond the scope of this book, it is important to realise that work with Culture and Health is grounded somewhere in our notions about the purpose of culture and the importance of health-or in other words, our beliefs about what it means to be human. I will not be writing a complete history here of how Culture and Health came to be a concept in Sweden, but a few points may serve to show how the concept has become established in a relatively short time in both Culture and Health practice and in academic research. This overview may also show something of the diversity of resources the field can lay claim to. Although I will begin with research before discussing practice, this does not mean the research came first. It is more reasonable to presume that practice came first, as my introductory historical example suggests. Although Culture and Health has probably always existed as practice, albeit not under that designation, it is nevertheless interesting here to discuss some of the particular efforts within Culture and Health that have been undertaken in various parts of Sweden in recent years. A suitable starting point is 2005, when the Swedish National Institute of Public Health (now the Public Health Agency) published Kultur för hälsa: En exempelsamling från forskning och praktik [English summary: The Significance of Culture for Health: An Anthology of Examples from Research and Practice]. 5 The examples cited in the report are derived mainly from a survey and initiation project run by the SNIPH since 2002 when a first hearing in the area of Culture and Health took place. The introduction to [The significance of] Culture for Health refers to the National Public Health Committee's final report, Health on Equal Terms, which finds it likely that greater participation in cultural activities would also contribute to better and more equal health among the population. Culture for Health also refers to a New Year's address in 2005 by Leif Pagrotsky, then minister of cultural affairs, when he said '[t]here is a clear correlation between consumption of culture and better health.' 6 Also mentioned is that the Swedish government bill Forskning för ett bättre liv [Research to make life better] stresses the importance of increased knowledge in the field and therefore allocated SEK 5 million in 2006 to research on Culture and Health (Swedish Government Bill 2004/05:80). In its publication Forskning om kultur & hälsa [Research on culture & health], the Research Council writes that it had allocated a total of SEK 15 million in the period of 2006-2008 to nine different Culture and Health projects in disciplines including arts education, psychology, sociology, anthropology and public health science. In the Research Council's review, Gunilla Jarlbro, professor of media and communication studies at Lund University and chair of the preparation group in charge of the research programme, makes the following statement about the success of the programme: At the final conference, I was struck by the incredible number of publications the programme had generated. Five million kronor times three years is truly not much for a research programme and it is impressive that so much was achieved with so little. 7

Cultural Differences and Health

.In recent years, the biopsychosocial approach to health has combined the World Health Organization’s (WHO) definition of ‘health’ as “a complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” and the current definition of ‘culture’ as “the thoughts, communications, actions, customs, beliefs, values, and institutions of racial, ethnic, religious, or social groups”; to form a more complex and multidimensional concept of health as a complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being in which individuals are increasingly viewed as part of a larger network of forces, significantly influenced by their ‘culture’ or socio-cultural environments (Uskul & Sherman, 2009; Ritter & Hoffman, 2008). This paper explores the effect of culture on health by examining and differentiating between the belief structures and traditions in healing and death of two American ethnic groups: American Indians and Amish Americans.

2014 - Culture and health (original) (raw)

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