|
Volume 35, Numbers 1 and 2, March and September - Special
Issue on
Women, HIV/AIDS and Human Rights Sponsored by UNESCO, New Delhi. |
|
Disease and
Suffering: Towards a framework for Understanding Health Seeking
Behaviour
Rama V. Baru
A review of social science research in both communicable and
non-communicable diseases shows that a behaviour perspective
largely informs it. Studies related to disease control and other
health programmes focus on the relationship between knowledge of
the specific disease, the attitude and the action that
individual take. The underlying assumption within this
perspective is that people do not have knowledge about the
disease and therefore do not take appropriate action, as
prescribed by biomedicine. Majority of studies within this
perspective therefore focus on the need for health education as
a means for ensuring better compliance of populations with
health programmes. While this is the dominant perspective in
explaining health-seeking behaviour, there are other
perspectives that have analysed and interpreted the same. The
present paper presents a brief review of the different
approaches used for explaining and interpreting health seeking
behaviour and the social sciences discipline hat have
contributed significantly to it.
Key Words: Disease, Illness, Suffering, Health seeking
behavior, HIV/AIDS. |
