CH. 1 What is Health?

Question 1

What Is Health? Cultural and Historical Roots

Answer 1

WHAT IS HEALTH? CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL ROOTS:

• Asks what it means to be “healthy”.
  
  • Essentially, a person’s cultural background, ethnicity, age, gender, and educational level make substantial differences in how he or she answers.

“ARE YOU HEALTHY?”– Can vary according to where you live, how old you are, what your parents and friends think constitutes health, what your religious or ethnic background is, and what a variety of other factors indicate about you.

CULTURE – The term that adequately captures all these different elements that influence health.

• “Differences in health that are not only unnecessary and avoidable but also considered unfair and unjust” are due to cultural factors.

WHO (World Health Organization – defines health as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being

KEY HEALTH BEHAVIORS – Getting six to eight hours of sleep, being physically active, eating a nutritional meal, and not smoking.

• Stretching frequently
• Getting a good night’s sleep is one of the best health behaviors to practice.
• One aspect that could be added is the word “spiritual.” Spirituality has been shown to positively affect those who practice it.

Question 2

Cross-Cultural Definitions of Health

Answer 2

Cross-Cultural Definitions of Health:

BIOMEDICAL APPROACH TO HEALTH – In Western medical circles, you are healthy if disease is absent.

• Of course, this definition focuses primarily on the physical or biological aspect of life; this approach taken by Western medicine.

TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINE (TCM) – Health is the balance of yin and yang, the two complementary forces in the universe.

• For optimal health, you should eat and drink and live your life with equal amounts of hot and cold qualities. Balancing hot and cold is a critical element of many different cultures (e.g., Chinese, Indian, and even Mexican)

AYURVEDA – Ancient system of medicine focuses on the body, the sense organs, the mind, and the soul. Defined health as the state in which “the three main biological units—enzymes, tissues, and excretory functions—are in harmonious condition and when the mind and senses are cheerful”

• Most of the world’s cultures use a more global and widespread approach to assessing health instead of just looking at whether or not disease is absent to determine health (as the biomedical model and most Western approaches do).

Question 3

Why is culture important?

Answer 3

WHY IS CULTURE SO IMPORTANT? – It helps explain why there are significant differences in the health of European Americans and non–European Americans.

CULTURE HAS MANY DIMENSIONS – Many of us limit discussions of culture to race or ethnicity.

• In reality, culture can be a variety of things. The dominant culture in Green Bay is Catholic, but people rarely realize that religion constitutes a form of culture as well. You could also say being a Packers fan is the dominant culture Green Bay?

Question 4

Culture

Answer 4

CULTURE – “A unique meaning and information system, shared by a group and transmitted across generations, that allows the group to meet basic needs of survival, by coordinating social behavior to achieve a viable existence, to transmit successful social behaviors, to pursue happiness and well-being, and to derive meaning from life”

• Culture can also include similar physical characteristics (e.g., skin color), psychological characteristics (e.g., levels of hostility), and common superficial features (e.g., hairstyle and clothing).
• There are more subjective aspects of culture that we cannot see or easily link to physical characteristics. For example, nationality, sex/gender, religion, and geography also constitute different cultural groups, each with its own set of prescriptions for behavior.
• Culture includes ethnicity, race, religion, age, sex, family values, geography (the region of the country), and many other features.
• Culture is dynamic because some of the beliefs held by members in a culture can change with time.
  
  • However, the general level of culture maintains stability because the individuals change together.
• Culture Examples – High school adolescents belong to a different culture than do college students. Even in college, there are different cultures. Some students live in dorms, and some live in off-campus apartments. On campus, also, there are athletes and musicians, among many others; each group provides different prescriptions for what is correct behavior.

“WHO AM I TEST?” – Use it to measure how people describe themselves. How you describe yourself tends to give many clues to your culture.

Question 5

Two Key Areas of Diversity

Answer 5

TWO KEY AREAS OF DIVERSITY:

SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS (SES) AND SEX:

• Two of the most important aspects that define cultural groups, often discussed as diversity.
  
  • Becoming one of the most important and widely studied constructs in health psychology.
• Often measured by combining income and education level.
• Almost any study done on this topic shows that poverty and illness tend to go together, often linked by factors such as access to health care and insurance.
  
  • The more money you have, the better your health.
• A person’s culture has a major impact on behaviors that influence health. Culture influences some explicit health behaviors.
  
  • Ex: How much do we exercise? Do we drink or smoke? Do we eat well?
  • Culture also influences a whole range of behaviors that indirectly influence our health.
    
    • Ex: how do we form relationships? How many close friends do we have and do we call on them when we are under stress or in need?
• Most behaviors that influence health—whether healthy behaviors such as physical activity and eating nutritionally balanced diets or unhealthy ones such as smoking or drinking excessively—depend heavily on the culture in which we grew up.

BIOPSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH – This type of approach focuses on the biology or physiology underlying health; the psychology or thoughts, feelings, and behaviors influencing health; and the ways that society and culture influence health.

• The term “biopsychosocial” reminds us that different components go together.
  
  • Ex: There is an association between depression, a mental health issue, and cardiovascular disease, a physical health issue.
• The biopsychosocial approach goes beyond defining health as simply the absence of disease and instead forces us to focus on the broader range of the critical determinants of health.

Question 6

Health psychology

Answer 6

HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY – an interdisciplinary subspecialty of psychology dedicated to promoting and maintaining health and preventing and treating illness.

• It is a discipline encompassed by the general field of behavioral medicine together with medicine and an array of public health sciences and services.
• Health psychologists pay close attention to the way that thoughts, feelings, behavior, and biological processes all interact with each other to influence health and illnesses ranging from chronic heart disease and cancer to diabetes and obesity
• The mind (psychology) and body (biology) influence health.

CULTURAL INFLUENCES ON BEHAVIOR – Our own health behaviors are largely dependent on the health behaviors of other individuals who share our cultural group.

HOW DID FREUD REVOLUTIONIZE THE WAY WE LOOK AT ILLNESS? – Freud was the first to draw attention to the possibility that illness could have psychological causes.

• Trained as a neuroscientist, Freud had a strong biological background. He was perplexed by clients who reported strong symptoms of illness but who lacked physical evidence of illness.
  
  • In talking to his clients, Freud discovered that many of their physical illnesses were due to psychological issues.
• He also noticed the work of Pierre Janet and of Franz Anton Mesmer, who cured cases of hysteria with hypnosis.
  
  • Once these psychological issues were resolved, the physical symptoms disappeared.

PSYCHOSOMATIC MEDICINE – Studying the influences of the mind on health.

BEHAVIORAL MEDICINE – Looks at nonbiological influences on health. Studying the influences of behavior on health and well-being.

EPIDEMIOLOGY – A branch of medicine that studies the frequency, distribution, and causes of different diseases with an emphasis on the role of the physical and social environments.

SOCIETY FOR HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY – Dedicated to four issues:

1. Advancing the contributions of psychology to the understanding of health and illness.
2. Encouraging the integration of biomedical information about health and illness with current psychological knowledge.
3. Promoting education and services in the psychology of health and illness.
4. Informing the psychological and biomedical community and the general public about the results of current research and service activities.

Question 7

Summary

Answer 7

SUMMARY:

There are many different definitions of health, each varying in its culture of origin

• Western medicine sees health more as the absence of disease whereas other cultures see health more as a balance of opposing forces or spiritual harmony.
  
  • The most common definition is that used by the World Health Organization: health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being.

CULTURE – Is broadly defined and includes ethnicity, sex, religion, gender, and nationality.

• Various dimensions of culture shape our health behaviors and our general health.
• Socioeconomic status and sex are two of the most important cultural variables, each leading to a variety of health differences.
• Individualism and collectivism are examples of basic cultural dimensions.

HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY USES A BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL APPROACH – This approach focuses on the biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors that influence health and health behaviors.

• The mind and the body are clearly interconnected, and this connection is critical to understanding health and illness.

FREUD – First psychologist to link the mind and body and to hypothesize psychological bases for physiological problems.

HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY MAIN GOALS ARE:

• prevention of illness,
• promotion of health,
• understanding of the biopsychosocial aspects of physical and mental illness, and
• improvement of the healthcare system.
• The main areas of health psychology are:
  
  • stress and coping,
  • health behaviors, and
  • issues in health care.