Subcultures of Health: Beliefs and Behaviors
Subcultures of Health
Irrational Behavior and Attitudes
Are irrational behavior and attitudes, erroneous, enigmatic, and relatively unchanged through time?
Scenarios for the Identification of Subcultures of Health
Health is an integral part of our daily lives. For some, it’s a condition that makes life possible. It is subject to value systems, beliefs, norms, and behavior patterns similar to those developed by other aspects of our daily lives.
The resurgence of so-called alternative medicines, which are now re-entering mainstream medicine, exemplifies how health management and disease control strategies diversify with the encouragement of new requirements that reflect new conceptions of health.
Health as a natural gift, health as a product of individual life choices, health as a product of the health system, health as a product of the environment, health and body control, and health and return to nature are not just empty slogans. They are belief systems that inform not only the modalities of health management but also the individual’s relationship with their body, food, lifestyle habits, free time, and health services. These can be considered expressions of specific subcultures of health.
Health and Sickness as Expressions of Belief Systems
Considering behaviors related to health and sickness as expressions of a belief system allows us to understand how these behaviors can challenge existing interpretive schemes.
Conceptions of health, lifestyle, and relationships with the institutional system of healing are closely related and interdependent, leading to constellations of motivations, behaviors, and attitudes that are not accidental.
Qualitative research conducted on 111 people, whose reflections on health, illness, work, and physical activity allowed for the articulation of a typology according to which health can be considered:
- Absence of disease
- Instrument
- Product
- Collective good
Health as Absence of Disease
Those who expressed this orientation argued that health is identified with normal physical and psychological functioning. Disease is a disorder that disturbs the body’s normal balance, induced from the outside (by the environment, lifestyle, bacteria, viruses, etc.).
For these subjects, health is ensuring a balance resulting from the equilibrium between factors like labor, alcohol, tobacco, food, drugs, and movement. It’s the concept of “fair measure.” Health is not experienced with fatalism but rather identified with “normal.”
Disease is a natural hazard that can strike anyone. The duty of social security is to protect against such risk. From this perspective, healing is dominated by systematic attention to conditions, and prevention, often identified with prognosis, is not trustworthy.
Health as a Tool
Health seen as a tool: something that allows individuals to achieve other objectives and purposes. Health, for example, enables work and self-sufficiency. It is a capital, an asset to be preserved and transmitted to children. Therefore, it’s necessary to acquire lifestyle habits that prolong the status of “healthy” for as long as possible.
Sleep, hygiene, food, and body care should be directed toward maintaining an efficient body whose functioning depends more on systematic practices than on the use of preventive care services, which are considered minor.
From this perspective, the financial aspect of social policy is highlighted.
Health as a Product
If, however, health depends on many factors, such as housing, food, work, and drugs, it is seen as a product, more or less controlled and controllable, which depends on both individual behavior and general living conditions. Health is a core value that governs individual life choices.
Health is often identified with life itself, as the cult of personal health tends to structure all activities, both social and physical, individual and collective. The social sphere is presented in the form of values and norms that impose limits on individual freedom.
Food consumption is based on what is natural, healthy, and pleasant. The diet is more related to the concept of fitness than medical considerations. Tobacco and alcohol are rejected as harmful, and physical activity is valued because it relaxes.
The state’s task is to intervene when the individual cannot make their choices. In case of a “threat,” health care is the only thing to expect a remedy.
The concept of health as a basic value of life leads to emphasizing the role of prevention and information that makes it possible to change unhealthy lifestyle behaviors and adopt more rational ones.
Health as a Collective Good
Finally, health can be considered by the person as a collective good that must be secured by various social institutions. In this view, since individual behavior and choices are considered consequential, health policies are valued positively, although still insufficient. Streamlining and maximizing the use of available resources are necessary to enable health policy’s redistributive effect.
Conclusion
An analysis of 111 in-depth interviews reveals how the concepts of health, physical care, feeding, use of services, diets, and the role attributed to social security give rise to typologies that identify groups of congruent behaviors.
This typology serves as an example of how, from individual motivations and subjective choices, behaviors carried out in relation to health and/or illness can be used to reconstruct systems of beliefs and practices relating to health that have uniqueness and consistency. These systems of beliefs and practices may be considered as specific health subcultures.