Personal Health Services Health Article

PERSONAL HEALTH SERVICES

"Personal health services" are the services that an individual receives from others to address health problems or for health promotion and disease prevention. It is helpful to consider the meanings and implications of each of these words. "Personal" is used to connote attention to improving or maintaining an individual's health state, though that state may directly impinge upon others, either in the family or community—there are emotional attachments to sick persons; an individual illness may diminish family resources and capacities; and illnesses have direct implications for communities, such as in the transmission of communicable diseases or in alternative uses for scarce clinical-care resources. Thus, a personal illness can have a profound impact on others, and on the health and well-being of the general public.

"Health" is not an easy term to define (see the discussion elsewhere in this volume), but in the context of health services, there are important conceptual issues. One, as noted above, is the role of health promotion and disease prevention in personal health services. Since many important dimensions of prevention are related to social behaviors or environmental modifications, they are often outside the usual health care system. Another is defining the boundary of health care in terms of appropriate themes. At least in the past, various community health centers and other medical care organizations provided assistance with housing, clothing, and personal legal matters, as well as referral to religious resources. This is not an issue of worthiness, but rather the implication here is that the content of medical services varies and must be explicitly addressed and defined.

The term "services" also requires discussion. While they often connote formal professional services, the patterns and content of care that impinge on a sick individual come from a variety of sources, many of which are neither professional nor part of any organized healing system. The same might be said of the administrative connotation of the term "services," implying not only a single health practitioner, but also care received from a variety of informal sources as well as from well-developed organizations and agencies. In fact, the history and sociology of health services suggest that most sick persons receive health care from diverse sources. Based on anthropological and other studies, there is evidence that all cultures have appointed healers to deal with infirmity. In some societies, these healers may be thought of as using folk, religious, or magical methods; and the sources and content of their lore may not always be clear. In these instances, healing takes place largely in the community, and generally outside of clinics or institutional settings. Interestingly, studying the lore and practices of traditional healing systems, usually in developing countries, has become an important activity in searching for new medicinal or other preventive or therapeutic entities that might have applications in Western societies.

In other societies, healers are much more well organized, and they have generally undergone varying degrees of professionalization and administrative organization. In this case, the healing is often performed in varying types of complex clinics and institutions, usually with a great degree of subspecialization. Nonetheless, no healing system totally dominates a given culture or society, and there are always challenges from alternative healing systems. It has been shown in many countries that many individuals seek and receive health care from highly diverse types of healing systems simultaneously.