Elsevier

The Lancet

Volume 384, Issue 9954, 1–7 November 2014, Pages 1607-1639
The Lancet

The Lancet Commissions
Culture and health

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(14)61603-2Get rights and content

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Executive summary

Planned and unplanned migrations, diverse social practices, and emerging disease vectors transform how health and wellbeing are understood and negotiated. Simultaneously, familiar illnesses—both communicable and non-communicable—continue to affect individual health and household, community, and state economies. Together, these forces shape medical knowledge and how it is understood, how it comes to be valued, and when and how it is adopted and applied.

Perceptions of physical and psychological

Background

Although an interest in other societies has taken many forms throughout history, examination of how different cultural concepts affect health-related behaviours began only at the start of the 20th century, with the advent of long-term anthropological fieldwork that exposed the diversity, complexity, and continuity of local health-related practices across cultures.29 One of the earliest clinicians to take up the comparative method for examining the influence of culture on health was William

Dynamic inequalities

Societies and groups (cultural, political, or professional) are built on consensus and conventional, often taken for granted, practices. These groups can become vulnerable in periods of great change and when exposed to external and internal stressors. Especially in unstable times, groups tend to focus on social and cultural differences rather than similarities.110, 111, 112 Although the views of individuals within societies, and the practices of those individuals that are based on diverse

Culture and knowledge

Health outcomes can be improved and money saved if caregivers are allowed time to engage with patients and help patients integrate into care communities. Why have more resources not been invested worldwide to support development of integrated communities of care that bridge the gap between biomedical settings and the diverse needs of multicultural groups? One reason is that increased medicalisation of clinical care throughout the 20th century has limited the role of empathy in health care. An

Findings

We have 12 key findings that together constitute a research agenda for culture and health.

Conclusion: lives to be valued

Health is a core human concern, even if it is not consciously considered, or is valued only for instrumental reasons. Everyone wants to lead a fulfilled life that is free from illness and disease, even if tending to disease can itself be a catalyst for hope and happiness.247, 248 In view of worldwide inequalities, emergence of improved caring should be inseparable from freedoms that all societies should provide.249, 250 Such freedoms, in turn, should allow human beings across race and gender

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