Though healthcare and nursing have been advanced impressively over the past few decades, new challenges have emerged, jeopardizing lives of millions of people. In order to fight the diseases that have become the stigma of the 21st century, from obesity to ebola, people will have to defy the viewpoint that is imposed on them by their culture and the norms of the society that they live in, and, instead, comply with the requirements that are set by the latest advances in healthcare and nursing.
It should be noted that the path towards changing people’s perspective of what is acceptable when it comes to tending to the needs of the patients is not going to be easy. At this point, the significance of crisis communication should be mentioned (Coombs 17). It can be assumed that crisis communication may be used as a tool in getting the message concerning the incompatibility of some of the cultural traditions and healthcare principles across. The question is, however, whether the methods for crisis communication can be chosen efficiently with regard to the cultural specifics of the target population.
Though the lack of awareness concerning the latest advances in healthcare is traditionally attributed to the residents of the areas that are quite remote from Europe and the USA, the residents of the latter, in fact, also display the tendency to have a range of curious misconceptions about healthy lifestyle and care of their health. For instance, the consumption of the famous – or, in terms of its effects on people’s bodies, infamous – Coca Cola drink show that the American population is just as hard to convince in the erroneous assumptions about the harmlessness of the drink that they consume on a daily basis as the residents of Africa (Anderson-Fye 562). Moreover, the overweight issue (Jutel 2269) displays the unwillingness of the U.S. residents to recognize the threat.
This raises the question whether the cultural context of specific diseases may possibly coexist with the one that is accepted in the traditional medicine. A recent study of the responses to ebola contraction in some of the African states involves specific burial traditions, which raise concern from the perspective of healthcare (Bennett 8). The perception of self, therefore, plays a crucial role in linking the healthcare practice and the cultural traditions within a specific community (Lester 481).
This does beg the question whether the threat of a specific disease can be reduced merely by spreading awareness concerning the problem in question and affecting people’s perception of the latest medical and healthcare related advances (Frewer 24). Indeed, the existing reports show that a deeper understanding of the traditional responses to risk increases the probability of disease prevention.
However, dismissing the existing practices at once simply because they were created in the context of the local culture does not seem reasonable as well. For example, the aforementioned burial traditions in some of the African tribes seem quite legitimate from a healthcare perspective, since they comply with the basic principles of sanitary norms and common sense: “However, when disease is classified as gemo, burial practices change. The body is not touched and is buried outside or at the edge of the village” (Hewlett and Amola 358).
Therefore, for the current perception of traditional healthcare approaches as opposed to the alternative solutions to be altered, a consistent and quite lengthy program on raising awareness is required. In addition, it is crucial to convince people that the changes in their responses to risk should not be viewed as an attempt to change their cultural beliefs. Instead, people must be convinced that healthcare extends beyond cultural standpoints and is based on science rather than on cultural rituals.
Works Cited
Anderson-Fye, Eileen P. “A Coca-cola Shape: Cultural Change, Body Image, and Eating Disorders in San Anders, Belize.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 28 (2004), 561–595. Print.
Bennett, Peter. “Understanding Responses to Risk: Some Basic Findings.” Risk Communications and Public Health. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 1999. 4–19. Print.
Coombs, Timothy W. “Parameters for Crisis Communication.” The Handbook of Crisis Communication. New York, NY: Wiley. 2009. 17–53. Print.
Frewer, Lynn J. “Public Risk Perception and Risk Communication.” Risk Communication and Public Health. Oxford, UK: OUP Oxford. 2009. 20–32. Print.
Hewlett, Barry S. and Richard P. Amola. “Cultural Context of Ebola in Northern Uganda.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 9.10 (2003), 1242–1248. Print.
Jutel, Annemarie. “The Emergence of Overweight as a Disease Entity: Measuring up Normality.” Social Science & Medicine 63.9 (2006), 2268–2276. Print.
Lester, Rebecca L. “The (Dis)embodied Self in Anorexia Nevrosa.” Social Science and Medicine 44.4 (1997), 479–489. Print.