Perspective of Health in Different Cultures

When I was reading one of our readings by Nichter, the author gave some examples of perceptions of health in other cultures. The most interesting part of the reading that stood out to me was how some parts of Caribbean, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, and Latin America find having parasitic worms in their body to be normal, and how they thought worms were part of their bodily function. I found this to be interesting, but more absurd because I would be terrified of having any kind of parasitic worms in my body. This was definitely a cultural difference, if not a cultural shock to me. It’s not always easy to accept the way that other cultures view certain things, and this also applies to concept of health. Culture influences how a person might identify a disease, seek medical assistance, and find treatments.

            In one of our readings by Nichter, the author gives the definition of ethnography, and some examples of ethnophysiology in different cultures. According to Nichter, ethnography is basically is how a culture understands bodily processes and how these perceptions influence health, physical development, illness, medicines, and diet. In the writing the author also states “Perceptions of bodily process influence what physical symptoms are deemed normal and abnormal at particular times and which ones are deemed serious enough to warrant treatment beyond simple palliative care. Ethnography contributes to the meaning accorded to particular symptoms and plays an important role in determining thresholds of symptom tolerance.” As Nichter mentions by figuring out how people view and understand health we can determine how much a person can withstand the illness.

            I wanted to connect this to the article that I found by Uskul and Sherman. The article, “Culture and Health Psychology: Insights from Socio-Cultural Perspective”, it talks about how understanding cultural differences in perspective of health and illness is important to establishing our definition of health to help and prevent disease worldwide. This article relates to the reading because it’s talking about how influential the studies of ethnophysiology to approaches that aim to prevent illness and promote health. In this article it talks about how health is no longer just a definition about the physical state of well-being, but now according to WHO since 1948, health is defined in terms of “physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”.  The studies of cultural differences create ways to improve health interventions, and give an insight to improve our understanding of health. As we study more about the cultural difference, the definition of health also broadens, which broadens our view of health. Furthermore, studying more about the differences, bridges the gap between two different cultures and promotes understanding health in different cultures without demeaning each other’s cultures without understanding. These ethnophysiological studies help to prevent and treat diseases among people.

The image that I found that I thought it linked to the reading and the article was this drawing below.  I actually saw this couple of years ago when I was web surfing. When I was thinking about cultural differences it reminded me this picture. Without explanation this picture might be hard to understand. It’s about the reactions of two different cultures to weather. The blue side of the picture shows the westerners or the European’s view of the sun and the rain, and the red side shows the easterners or Chinese’s view of the sun and the rain. The facial expressions of people on the blue side have smiling face for sunny weather, and sad face for rainy weather. However, the faces on the red side are both smiling for sunny and rainy weather. This image seems unrelated to the reading and the article, but I thought this picture represented how people in different culture perceive same objects differently than we do, and respond differently than we might. Although this image does not represent everyone in that particular culture, it shows how two very different cultures may differ depending on what environment they were raised in.

Culture is not the only factor that shapes an individual’s perception of health because there are other factors such as political, economic, social positions, personal experiences, information received, and many more. Understanding of one’s culture and how they view health will not make people in other cultures to abandon their perceptions and adopt our health perspective. It’s not easy to abandon what they have believed and experience through their life, and suddenly adopt a new system that seems like hoax. This goes same for us who are used to firmly believing our medical system is the best way to treat disease. Just like it would be hard for us to imagine having worms in our body as normal part of bodily function. Especially in the medical field it’s sometimes hard to determine how to treat a disease or epidemic. Even though we claim Western view of health is most effective system of treatment, there should be no room for over-estimation. Since I learn more about medical anthropology it seems there’s so much to discover and change in the medical field to bring better medical system. As Dr. Ceron mentioned in class, Westerners’ concept of health is also affected by their cultures. We all believe in something that we are used to and have experienced.

I found this very important aspect of medical anthropology because everyone experiences something different, but it’s hard for us to realize that we all perceive the world differently because of those differences in experiences.  Although we might not be able to perfectly understand every aspect of health perception of an individual, it may gives us some clues to predict what might happen. There’s always more to learn about different cultures and how to connect with them, and not through inserting our systems into them, and finding these differences can have a big affect on how people seek for treatment. We may live in a same world but we all see things differently.

Reading: Nichter, Mark (2008). Global health: why cultural perceptions, social representations, and bio politics matter. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Pp. 23-132.

Article: http://beta.in-mind.org/node/380

Image: http://randomwire.com/cultural-differences