Cultural Aspects in Health Behavior

There are factors that contribute to patient’s decision making and their perception about health, such as cultures. However, Culture can give positive and negative impact on health behavior. Culture that leads to wrong understanding about health and wellbeing and contradicting to medical science, can be detrimental to the patients. Unfortunately, cultures stick tightly to particular communities and leads to persistent health problem. Therefor e, it is important to know which aspects of culture need to be considered by health worker in order to treat patient holistically and to prevent diseases. The purpose of this study is to determine what aspects of cultures that effects one’s health behavior and how it could influence the health behavior. The authors searched material in address field from Google Scholars, Pubmed, Proquest and ScienceDirect in the past 5 years. The inclusion criteria employed is review articles included in this study come in the forms of research articles, editorials, comments, literature reviews in quantitative, qualitative or mixed-methods research. From this Study the Authors found that cultural aspects that affect health behavior are religion, communication, family, nature-culture-health, trust and tradition, and traditional healing method. Those mostly effects health seeking behavior. From this review the authors can conclude that in holistic health efforts, it is important to assess the cultural aspects that exist in the patient's environment. More strategies are needed not to break the culture but to fix the wrong opinion and to use culture as strength to address the barrier of health behavior.

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