Question

Discuss how culture affects health: physical and psychological health, perception of health, and health decision-making. Discuss examples from your own experience, culture, and patient care experience.

Answer 1

Ans) Miscommunication is often a source of provider–patient difficulties. Discrepant meanings and intent are often at the root of the trouble. These discrepancies often go unrecognized. The special character of cross-cultural communications makes it imperative that providers address these issues with care and work to develop their own communication skills.

- Materials reveal a number of common problems that interfere with the generation of equivalent messages. Many information transfer problems are linguistic: bad paraphrasing, lack of linguistic equivalency, substitution or addition of terms, incorrect numbers and names, and garbling of the message. Other issues include interpreter beliefs, biases, emotions, disparate views of meanings (of events, terms, and transactions), and the personal image of the interpreter. Messages and meaning can be distorted for a wide variety of reasons.

- The influence of culture on health is vast. It affects perceptions of health, illness and death, beliefs about causes of disease, approaches to health promotion, how illness and pain are experienced and expressed, where patients seek help, and the types of treatment patients prefer.

- Culture also affects health in other ways, such as:

• Acceptance of a diagnosis, including who should be told, when and how.
• Acceptance of preventive or health promotion measures (e.g., vaccines, prenatal care, birth control, screening tests, etc.).
• Perception of the amount of control individuals have in preventing and controlling disease.
• Perceptions of death, dying and who should be involved.
• Use of direct versus indirect communication. • • Makingor avoiding eye contact can be viewed as rude or polite, depending on culture.
• Willingness to discuss symptoms with a health care provider, or with an interpreter being present.
• Influence of family dynamics, including traditional gender roles, filial responsibilities, and patterns of support among family members.
• Perceptions of youth and aging.
• How accessible the health system is, as well as how well it functions.