Lay Beliefs and Health Promotion

Question 1

What are lay health beliefs?

Answer 1

How people understand their health/illness, based on no medical knowledge

Question 2

What is lay epidemiology?

Answer 2

Peoples understanding of who gets what diseases and why

Question 3

What is lay referral?

Answer 3

People chat to their peers to an issue before seeing a doctor

Question 4

Why are lay beliefs important?

Answer 4

They influence on peoples health behaviours, how they seek services and their compliance
People are fucking stupid, so reject may medial advice if it clashes with their beliefs

Question 5

What are some principles of health promotion?

Answer 5

Empowering, participatory, holistic, intersectoral, equitable, sustainable, multi-strategy

Question 6

What is primary prevention?

Answer 6

Prevent the onset of issues

e.g. imms, prevention on contact with risk factors

Question 7

What is secondary prevention?

Answer 7

Detection/treatment of disease/risk factors at an early stage
e.g. cervical ca. screening

Question 8

What is tertiary prevention?

Answer 8

Minimise effects of established disease

e.g. steroids to prevent asthma attacks

Question 9

What are the 5 approaches to health promotion?

Answer 9

1. Medical intervention/prevention
2. Behaviour change
3. Education
4. Empowerment
5. Social change

Question 10

What are some dilemmas in health promotion?

Answer 10

Ethics of interfering with peoples lives
Victim blaming
Fallacy of empowerment
Reinforce -ve stereotypes
Unequal distribution of responsibility
Prevention paradox = the seemingly contradictory situation where the majority of cases of a disease come from a population at low or moderate risk of that disease, and only a minority of cases come from the high risk population (of the same disease). This is because the number of people at high risk is small