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How do individuals conceive illness and symptoms? Do their conceptions conflict with the physician's views of their illness, and what happens if they do? This book thoroughly explores the field of disease representation, describes and discusses lay illness models in a variety of social, historical and cultural contexts, and it shows the impact of those models on the evolution and the treatment of diseases, on patients' ways of coping with health disorders. In the West we are accustomed to thinking of health problems in a largely biomedical framework, but fieldwork with non-Western peoples has shown us alternative explanatory structures to account for symptoms and disease. For western psychologists an awareness of cross-cultural variation in collective representations of disease and illness raises the possibilities that individual representations of health and illness vary within a culture and such variations may help to account for variation in health- and illness-related behavior.
Welche Vorstellungen haben Laien von Krankheit und welchen Einfluß hat die soziale, historische und kulturelle Umgebung hierauf? Beeinflussen die Vorstellungen das Verhalten bei Krankheit - und auch bei Gesundheit? Inwieweit unterscheidet sich diese Sichtweise von der des Arztes? Hierauf gibt das vorliegende Buch in anschaulicher Weise Anwort.
