Lecture 2 - Culture And Health Flashcards
Medical Anthropology
How people in different cultures and social groups explain the causes of ill health, the types of treatments they believe in, and to whom they turn if they get ill.
Culture
A system of shared ideas, attitudes, and practices that defines the social system of it’s members.
Values
Guiding principles for behaviour.
Attitudes
Ways of viewing the world that arise out of experience and access to information.
Belief
Systems of understanding, belief systems which may be religious or otherwise, which provide guiding principles that help people make sense of the world.
Social norms
Rules or standards that guide or constrain an individual’s actions or behaviour.
Race
The concept that human beings can be divided into biologically distinct sub-groups, identified through phenotype, or outward appearance. It is a social construct used to categorise people, and often implies assumed and unproven intellectual superiority or inferiority.
Ethnicity
Membership in a group based on a shared background, a sense of belonging, self-identity and the recognition by others that one is a member.
Ethnocentrism
Viewing others from one’s own cultural perspective, with an implied sense of cultural superiority on an inability to understand or accept the practices and beliefs of other cultures.
Culture-bound syndromes
Locally defined patterns of illness that occur only in specific communities and are identified by a set of symptoms that derives from the culture of society that experiences them.
The Placebo Effect
A term that covers a broad range of ways in which an illness or condition in the human body improves through intervention, despite the use of an inert or inactive medication.
Illness behaviour
The socially acceptable way to act when sick.
Cultural Awareness
The recognition of differences and commonalities and understanding one’s own cultural influences. Those differences could be seen in a positive, negative or neutral manner.
Cultural safety
The acknowledgment by health professionals and organisations of the need to provide services in a manner appropriate to all members of a diverse population. Cultural safety is achieved when a client perceives their healthcare was delivered in a manner that respected and maintained their cultural integrity.
Cultural Security
When health organisations and health professionals operate from a position where appropriate responses to cultural diversity are not only acknowledged, but actually embedded in all aspects of care eg from policy to practice.
