Health Care Culture Analysis

Whether we know it or not, culture affects our lives in countless ways. The culture that people grow up in is, most of the time, what their beliefs are based on. This includes beliefs about health care, how we treat, view, and recover from illness. The culture around us also can limit our access to health care or can broaden the types of treatment we receive.
In the United States, we are blessed to have so much scientific knowledge. We understand a large number of diseases enough to know the cause as well as the treatment. For this reason, nearly all people in the United States rely on medical professionals to treat them if they become sick. In some countries, people rely on prayer or other spiritual rituals to treat diseases. In our culture,
prayer always seems to be supplementary, or if someone is terminally ill. How we treat diseases scientifically, is based on our culture. Personally, I know that I am blessed to be living in the Grand Rapids area, where we have access to plenty hospitals. I can seek out care based on specialty, and even have a choice of what hospital I want to go to. If I had grown up in a different culture, I doubt that I would have the amount of access that I currently have.
Another way that our culture has evolved through gaining knowledge, is the topic of smoking. Nowadays, most buildings are smoke-free, and you can’t even smoke around them. I remember when I was younger and not as much was known about smoking and my grandparents would take me out to breakfast and the restaurant was divided up into smoking and non-smoking sections. With all the knowledge that we now have about the dangerous effects of smoking, I can’t imagine going to a restaurant that allows smoking. While I was growing up, we had presenters come to our schools and speak about the dangers of smoking, drugs, and alcohol. I know that many teens have tried smoking in their lives, but I never really had that pressure because I knew all of the harmful effects.

In the past, our culture has placed a stigma around mental illness.
Yet in the past few years, there has been a push to educate the public about mental illnesses to steer away from the stigma. Still, we treat mental health differently than we treat physical health. Sometimes we can stand in our own way of receiving health care. For example, tons of people have a stereotype of what someone with depression looks like, yet they can’t identify when someone they are close to is struggling with it. In middle school, I cared so much about the stigma surrounding mental illness that I didn’t seek treatment until it was almost too late. I am so grateful that my family has the education and understanding to avoid seeing me as a stereotypical, mentally unstable patient that we see in movies. It is so wonderful that people today are understanding mental illnesses and the stigma has gone down. If I was not living in the United States, I may have avoided seeking treatment
altogether.
As I stated above, the family has been crucial in my health care. Knowing that I have people around me who know what I am dealing with and are willing to try to understand it and help me through it has made sticking to treatments much easier. It might not seem like an enormous deal, but when you are in a stressful situation, having someone there to support you can be everything. Many cultures understand the importance of family in health care treatment. However, not everyone has family that is willing to try and understand them and is there to support them.
Although there are many benefits to living in West Michigan, where most of the cultural aspects have had positive effects on my health, there are also negatives.
In the United States, in general, we think of beauty as what we see displayed on TV. As a female, I think that there is always the pressure to look and act a certain way. Even though I acted like I didn’t care if I looked like the girls in the magazines, there was always a part of me that wished that I looked different. I think that many people growing up have that struggle of finding who they are and where they fit in and seeing all of these “bikini ready” models looking like they were having so much fun definitely had an impact on my
health.