Family Health Beliefs

Physician and anthropologist Arthur Kleinmenn has made an important distinction

between illness and disease. Disease describes the medical condition , whreas the
illness experiences includes how the sick person and members of the family or wider
social network perceive, line with and respond to symptoms and disability. The
perseption of illness includes the appraisal of severity and the meaning that the
disease has for the patient and family. This attention to meaning is a significant
component of medical family therapy treatments of families with health problems.
Nursing researches Wright, Watson, and Bell, have written about how family members
can recognizeand modify their implicit and explicit health beliefs. Discussing family
health beliefs is a natural extension of primary care, in which any history of a patients
symptoms usually inclludes questions about patient perceptions. Family assistance
includes assesing the agreement and variety of health beliefs among family members.
1. What does each family member thin caused the illness?
Health belief usually reflect a combination of knowledge about disease (ex:
understanding of cardiac risk factors), personal views of health and illness and religious
and cultural beliefs. Health beliefs maybe quite idiosyneratic and not internally
consistent. A woman may believe that illness in general is largely a matter of chance.,
but that her husband developed heart disease because of stress at work. It is clarifying
to identfy the unique views held by catch familu member about health in general and
about this particular illness episode. Some common beliefs about etiology of
illnessinclude
-

Fate or bad luck

Blame for inadequate self-care (ex: smoking lack of excercise)
Blame for past misdeeds (ex: an illegitimate birth, divorce)
Blaming other family members ( ex: your drinking mademe ill or I get chest
pain whenever we fight)
Genetics (ex: cancer)
Medical maltreatment (ex: I got lung cancer after my endoscopy)
Religion (ex: its god will)

2. What do family members believe they or others can do to improve the

patients health?
A familys sense of control about an illness may be quite different than their beliefs
about its etiology. A family may believe that the illness is the resut of past misdeeds,
but that there is nothing they can do to control the illness; or that the disease occured
by chance, but the individual is responsiblefor maintaining the best health possible.
Agency or self-efficacyis the sense of active involement one can have in their own
health care. These terms are preferable to control because chronic illness has many
aspects that cannot be controlled.
3. How do family members believe that the clinician can be helpful?

Families will have different beliefs about how much influence the clinician or medicine
in general has on the illness. This is the area in which personal and cultural beliefs
about illness and treatment are sifnificant. Some families will expect the clinician to be
responsible for illness care and even the clinician when the illness is diagnosed
worsens.