Health Traditions Model Analysis

Health Traditions Model
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April 1, 2020
For many people around the world, healing does not only take place in the usual healthcare setting. In several of these places, healing of different kinds of ailments can also take place in religious places, isolated areas, as well as other locations with the help of ‘alternative models’ that may or may not be based on science. Interestingly, people who come from different cultures retain their way of thinking about the disease as they try to ‘acculturate’ into another. In Specter’s Health Traditions Model, he emphasized that these ways of thinking are based on different thought patterns (maintain, protect, and restore health) that individuals use in order to integrate into a new cultural setting CITATION Rit \l 1033 (Rittle, 2015). In this article, this model would be used to analyze how different kinds of practitioners would deal with a stomach ache (or empacho), which is a typical kind of illness. All in all, the author believes that by looking at how culture affects the mentality of people in treating a disease, then it becomes easier to provide a more holistic type of care in the future.
Different Types of Care
As stated earlier, stomach ache is one of the most common kinds of diseases for both adults and children. Due to this, most people would try to cure it at home by taking or applying medications. However, if symptoms persist, then patients usually try to find care from different kinds of practitioners. In most cases, patients who suffer from a chronic stomach ache would usually go to a physician for diagnosis and checkup. Accordingly, since the physician is armed with technical knowledge about the disease (i.e., differential diagnoses), then he might prescribe mild pain relievers and advise the patient to undergo a fecal examination to confirm the presence of any microorganism that causes the symptoms.
In contrast to this, patients who believe that costly medical procedures can be avoided by taking ‘alternative’ or ‘natural medicine’ can go to tr...