Preventive Health Care

Health and education are today United in our social context, in such a degree that can offer very approximate values of the quality and well-being of our society. The vision of our population with respect to the triad: disease, health and culture, is always marked by the culture in which we are immersed and received education. Current cultural diversity requires even more, to strive to decipher the symbolic codes used by patients outside of our own culture, just to know their real health needs. In addition, always should keep in mind as the personal future of nursing, the risk of categorized as medical problems, situations which may simply correspond to problems of another nature: economic, social, cultural or educational. Intervention and sometimes the intrusion of medicine and with all my respect for the profession in areas which are not themselves is all too often a very particular characteristic of our time. This eagerness to put remedies where it can sometimes become unnecessary, contributes to practise corrective measures of health in a few imbalances that have a foundation of socio-cultural character.

Proper communication might help in Diagnostics and the subjective interpretation of the symptoms that the patient presents at the time analysed their socio-cultural nuances. For these reasons, it is necessary to make an effort leg understanding contexts relating to health and beliefs of other cultures, as well as to distance ourselves from our cultural models of the West. Only thus can we observe the patients in a more objective manner and evaluate them as a whole, any cultural knowledge obtained at two levels, a general and a specific. At a general level, the healthcare professional understands that culture, ethnicity, race and the same process of emigration can affect the acquisition of values, how to address personal problems or disease, to social and professional relationships the vision emic of society and its customs.