01 Education and Health Systems

• Functions of Education towards Individual

  • Development of inborn potentialities
  • Modifying behavior
  • Holistic development
  • Preparing for the future
  • Developing personality
  • Helping for adjustability
• Functions of Education towards Society

  • Social change and control
  • Reconstruction of experiences
  • Development of social and moral values
  • Providing opportunity or equality
• Functions of Education towards Nation

  • Inculcation of civic and social responsibility
  • Training for leadership
  • National integration
  • Total national development
• Health System


  The sum total of all the organizations, institutions, and resources whose primary purpose is to improve health
• Health System


  • Needs staff, funds, information, supplies, transport, communications, and overall guidance and direction
  • Needs to provide services that are responsive and financially fair, while treating people decently
• Culture-specific Syndrome


  A combination of psychiatric and somatic symptoms, which the body absorbs social stress and manifests symptoms of suffering, considered to be a recognizable disease only within a specific society or culture
• Ethnomedicine


  The study of cross-cultural health systems, which expanded its focus to include topics such as perceptions of the body, culture and disability, and change in indigenous or "traditional" healing systems
• Western Biomedicine


  Mind and body are distinct, a person may be declared dead while the heart is still beating, so long as the brain is judged to be "dead" (no brain activity)
• Ethnomedicine


  The body is a bounded physical unit, people do not accept a person brain death (no brain activity)
• Defining and Classifying Health Problems (System of Diagnosis)


  • Western Biomedicine: Disease is referred to as a biological health problem that is objective and universal, Illness is referred to as culturally specific perceptions and experiences of a health problem
  • Ethnomedicine: Basis for labelling and classifying health problems such as its cause, vector, affected body part, symptoms, or combinations of these, Knowledgeable elders are the keepers and pass it down through oral traditions, It is based on natural, socioeconomic, psychological, or supernatural causes
• Prevention


  • Awas (lumps/marks on the skin): Pregnant women may have been denied food they desired or have been pressured to eat food they did not want, or they may have encountered a rude, drunk, or angry person (usually a man), Prevention: Be considerate of pregnant women, make sure to give her the food she wants, and behave with respect in her presence
  • Sudden death of men: People believe that widow ghosts roam around in search for men who will be taken as 'husbands', and to whom these ghosts will have sexual intercourse with, Prevention: Displaying wooden-carved phalluses in residential compounds to protect residents, especially boys and men, from the "nightmare deaths" at the hands of malevolent "widow ghosts"
• Healing Systems


  • Western Biomedicine: Humoral Healing emphasizes balance among natural elements within the body
  • Ethnomedicine: Community healing emphasizes the social context as a key component, and is carried out within the public domain
• In an informal sense, everyone is a "healer" because self-treatment is always the first consideration in dealing with a perceived health problem
• Some people become recognized as having special abilities to diagnose and treat health problems. Cross-cultural evidence indicates some common criteria of healers