Self-care: a practice towards patient autonomy?



Websites, blogs and forums on health and well-being fall within the broad theme of self-care : often, when we suffer from a slight disorder, before turning to a professional of homeopathic or allopathic medicine we document ourselves through the resources of the web in an attempt to realize a self-diagnosis on the evil that afflicts us and find possible remedies and solutions .

Even the medicine box in every home is a central element of self-care practices. When you have the usual headache, fever or cold, the medicine box is used to take a drug that we already know in the hope of getting better as soon as possible.

These and other self-care practices are spreading fast, encouraged by the wide availability of information material on issues related to health and well-being and the availability on the market of over-the-counter drugs (also called OTC drugs from the English Over The Counter, “on the counter "), Which do not require medical prescription.

What is self-care

The spread of self-care strategies is a phenomenon that deserves the attention of researchers in the field of medicine and social sciences. In Italy one of the first studies on the subject, carried out by Veronica Agnoletti, was published in 2012 in the book “ Towards self-care and self-medication. An apparent convergence ". The reading of this text allows us to deepen the complexity of the topic from a scientific point of view, of which we can only make a brief mention in this article.

The term " self-care " ( self-care in the English-speaking world) defines the set of knowledge, techniques, practices used at an individual, family or community level to protect one's health and to heal an illness independently, without resorting to doctor or a prescription drug . It is therefore a broad concept that includes the domestic use of biomedicine tools (such as thermometers or drugs) and herbal and homeopathic products, but also includes the increasing attention of individuals towards a healthy lifestyle.

This is why self-care should not be confused with the practices of folk or traditional medicine because, even if the methods of self-care can draw on popular knowledge, they also feed on the concepts and techniques of biomedicine .

In fact, self-care practices can include self-medication, that is the set of treatments that a person performs on himself with over-the-counter medicines to mainly solve illnesses and disorders that are easy to diagnose, such as seasonal ones (in the case of treatments made with prescription medicines instead we talk about self - prescription ).

Healing: therapeutic and symbolic efficacy

The advantages of self-care

Self-care has advantages both for individuals and for the national medical system.

From the point of view of individual persons, self-care practices allow greater freedom and autonomy of choice in the therapeutic itinerary to be followed and in the type of medicine and medicines to be entrusted, which can range from homemade remedies, to the treatment of holistic medicines, to most common analgesics and anti-inflammatories for sale in pharmacies.

The advantages for the health system, on the other hand, are found above all in terms of a progressive facilitation of therapeutic processes (from diagnosis, to the search for adequate medicine, to care activities).

If each person becomes able to manage minor health problems independently, the health system - and consequently its users - can benefit from this: waiting times and queues are reduced, doctors receive fewer patients and can thus provide more service careful and thorough.

The risks of self-care

The greater autonomy we are acquiring in the field of health, however, presents risks that we must not underestimate. One of these is the increase in the medicalization and pharmacologisation of illnesses which until a few decades ago were treated with rest and which are now treated with the use of rapid-acting symptomatic drugs.

Through the spread of self-medication, drugs are progressively getting out of the clinical-medical environment to become part of everyday life in the same way as other objects of common use, such as food products.

This aspect of self-care, which we could define as pharmacological consumerism, instead of generating autonomous individuals who are aware of the multiplicity of treatment options existing in the field of medicine, can cause a sort of drug dependence and rejection of malaise as a natural experience of the human body .

Listening to the disease. Metamedicine

Bibliography:

  • Agnoletti Veronica, “Towards self-care and self-medication. An apparent convergence ”, 2012, FrancoAngeli Editore, Milan.
  • Pizza Giovanni, “Medical anthropology. Body knowledge, practices and policies ”, 2005, Carocci Editore, Rome.

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