Socio-Cultural Dimensions of Health Practices & Beliefs
Importance of a Belief System Concerning Health
The spread of self-treatment, self-medication, and reluctance to follow therapeutic and/or medical dietary advice, resistance and/or inability to adopt preventive behaviors are all factors that cannot be explained and understood solely in terms of the efficiency and effectiveness of the health system, its coverage, capacity, or ability to understand and correctly interpret the health needs of users. It is an indicator that generally, people have more or less correct ideas about what to avoid to stay healthy and cure diseases: ideas, ultimately, about what is relevant to their own health.
Scholars on the topic outline how a multitude of research studies and reports have revealed a constellation of diverse and complex attitudes and behaviors related to health, which seem enigmatic, irrational, erroneous, and relatively unchanging.
This constellation consists of a complex world of “beliefs” that constantly interact with mainstream medicine. Clearly, the health system has penetrated through its canons, codes, language, and systems of “beliefs” experienced and translated into daily practice by individuals. This insight is reinforced by Massman-day. The fact, for example, that the amount of drugs supplied to children is directly proportional to the amount of drugs taken by the mother demonstrates the importance of such penetration.
Excluding cases in which the patient is fully in charge of the care system or periods of acute illness, cases in which the subject’s decision-making power is drastically reduced, many people live without any conflict between what the doctor says and what they think they should do, according to settings determined each time in each case.
For the system of “beliefs” on health means a more or less related to values, norms, knowledge, and behaviors linked explicitly to health.
It is known that living conditions have a direct impact on health status or the birth of certain diseases. For this purpose, studies have been performed. However, studies, as evidenced by some authors, say little about the motivations. Therefore, speaking of a system of “beliefs” about health is to be born in reference to what the subjects consciously carried out to stay healthy and/or cure disease. It is also a belief system that existed even before contact with the institutional system of health care.
The Belief Model of Health (Health Belief Model)
To identify and understand the factors that influence the implementation of autonomous and individual actions linked to the management of problems that stem from the broad field comprising discomfort to disease, some explanatory models have been developed, summarized under the expression patterns of behavior related to health. Such pressure includes, however, a multiplicity of actions and behaviors, from the demand for professional advice to specific preventive activities.
In the models synthesized and presented schematically, reading and interpretation of “subjective” symptoms play a significant role. The symptom becomes a kind of stimulus, forcing the individual to become aware of their new status; it forces, at the same time, a cost-benefit analysis. The costs taken into account once again include the fear and anxiety related to the symptom and disease, the level of interference of the disease with the normal activities of daily living, its depravity, and last but not least, the social “disapproval.”
In such models, and after successive elaborations, the Health Belief Model (HBM) has been tuned, which depends essentially on five factors at play:
- Predisposition to disease.
- Severity of the disease.
- Obstacles to carrying out the recommended action.
- Benefits induced by the recommended action.
- Reinforcing elements.
For a person to decide to carry out preventive behavior in relation to a particular disease, it is necessary to make a cost-benefit analysis applied to a problem that concerns them closely (for example, a disease to which they are considered “vulnerable”), a problem on which they have conducted their assessment.
This model can be outlined as follows: Bias + Disease Severity = Perception of threat induced by the disease or ease in taking preventive measures. Benefits – Obstacles = The possibility of reducing the threat.
Specifically, the HBM is governed by the following:
a) The willingness to adopt preventive measures depends on how much the subject thinks they are predisposed to contracting a particular disease and the seriousness of its consequences.
b) The assessment made by the individual on the feasibility and effectiveness of timely preventive action is confronted with the physical, psychological, and other economic costs and/or made in connection with the barriers and obstacles to the implementation of preventive behavior.
The decision to take preventive action also weighs the reinforcing incentives, which can be both internal and external.