Contemporary Health Consciousness - Literature review Example

CONTEMPORARY HEALTH By (Insert both names) (Name of class) (Professor’s name) (Institution) (City, State) (Date) Crawford (2004) argues that contemporary health consciousness produces a spiral of anxiety and control. Do you agree? I. INTRODUCTION A civilizing look to hazards, emphasis that definite risks are taken seriously not for the reason that they are mainly significant threats, but because of the role they take part in codifying limits for the individual, group or society ( Moore & Burgess 2010). We find that medical ethnicity in highly developed a hi-tech society is characterized by plenty of warnings on health risks, together with guidance for protecting human beings against them. According to Crawford (2004) the immune system has begun to function ethnically as the main guarantor of health and the important mark of differential endurance in the modern times. It would be just to say that immune system is perceived as a significant cultural idea which is often used by common people to think about their bodies, health and society Health awareness and human beings action to look after their health have turned into basic obligation to the pursuit for safety measures. Taking care of one’s health is amongst modernity’s main symbolic practices. Martin, E. (1998) claims that many people view the body as a complex, liquefied and open system rather than an inflexible system of mechanical parts. The body is linked to its environment rather than blocked from it. II.DISCUSSION The recent crucial part of health is based on the recognition of risk in order to manage it. The scientific dictionary of risk has replaced the holy language of sin in describing tolerable and improper behavior. In the past times misfortunes were more probable to be credited to: ‘the Gods’ or beyond human control. Discourses of risk have grown to be persistent and are used to clarify deviations from the custom, misfortunes and terrifying events. Risk discussion emphasizes the capability of persons to change their conduct and make best use of their health. Judgments about risk signify implicit moral judgments though they are expressed as objective scientific facts. The quest for health has turned out to be a unique characteristic of middleclass personality. Americans fear the food they consume, the water they drink, the air they inhale, the ground they live on, and the power they use. This means that assurance about the physical world has become doubt (Douglas & Wildavsky 1983). It is clear that eating also involves issues of identity, self-control and civilized and ethical conduct which can be termed as social risk (Lupton 2000). Control and anxiety are the results of health awareness and action The immune system has been mentioned as the central participant in the health ring when one thinks about nutrition, exercises, stress, environmental toxins, cancer and AIDS. Nearly everyone believes that the immune system determines whether you are going to get ill or stay well (Martin 1998). The immune system must adjust always in order to counter challenges and threats. It requires learning and it interacts with other systems in the body. In a research, conducted on the immune system Martin, E. (1998) experienced the behavior in which thoughts about immunity and want to be receptive and flexible to survive - have influenced our every day lives.He shows that our health is rated depending on the flexibility of our immune systems, while practical learning advance the perception that the majority of important staff are flexible and compliant(Martin 1998). Martin, E. (1998) compares the immune system to a fortress. The skin is the external wall of the fortress, which is thick and hard for invaders to break. Just like the fort is made of areas that are in contact with the exterior surroundings such as mucous membranes, eyes, lung lining, noses, genitals, and the entire intestinal system. In case of any damage to the barriers or the attack is successful, then the next stage of the war begins and the soldiers of the immune system start their work. Inside the fortress, these soldiers who are made up of a range of cell types work as a squad to guard against the enemies. Dangers to health constantly disclosed and tied to practices of management, capture our concerned mind and inspire actions for extra information and control. The effectiveness of act cannot be in pace with understanding acquired and knowledge itself becomes more and more difficult. If the search of health cannot deliver on its pledge of improved security, the ethical assurance and strategies of merit invested in the pursuit may also be doubted. Those individuals who are health conscious have the information of a gap involving prescriptive guidance and what one does in reality. They also believe that, no matter how much one complies with the regulations of health, risks go beyond the personal capability for protection through changes in the way of life or other precautionary actions and that still more dangers continue to be unknown. Risk is linked with choice, responsibility along with blame. There are characteristics of current medical culture that add to the spiral of control and anxiety where different forms of mass communication are well thought-out as essential to all of them. A vast body of proof regarding the social production of health hazards has been always addressed to people, spawning health and safety movements, a huge development of regime regulation and decades of debate. The rise of excessive doubts has turned out to be a common complaint expressed by representatives of hazard-producing industries. Health educators, supported by epidemiological facts, have made everyday life hazard a subject of public understanding. Professional health promotion is at present supported by government guidelines, included into the school curriculum, turned into normal practice for patient education in medical settings, spread through mass media and passionately taken up by the focused middle class (Crawford 2004). The increasing message of health promotion says that existing life is places people the danger zone Health promoters must frequently discover out most recent ways to confront the human want to feel protected and the attraction for discounting danger. Those who attempt to live a healthy life experience behavior changes gradually and are subject to decline (Crawford, 2000). Nearly everyone is continually reminded of the upcoming consequences that are as a result of disobedient. Considering the level of the task, we come to realize that personal acts of safety do not take away the harm’s way from us. Crawford (2004) elaborates that modern improvements in genetic testing and selection completely broaden the extent of medical surveillance and the number of people who now live with the information of their personal susceptibility to infection. Mistrust of expertise has become a basic feature of the rising reliance on specific knowledge. Depending on the basis, people may be liable to emphasize the validity of professional information. The extraordinary interest given to lifestyle dangers does not resolve the political crisis for industry or government. The danger of danger is that no attention is resistant to the destabilizing effects of anxiety and control. The danger of danger is that politics aggravated by lack of confidence persistently threaten to blow up the borders of that organization. Insecurity is an observed state prone to displacements, contamination and intensification (Crawford 2004). Crawford (2004) claims that anxiety becomes too much when it results to a loss of self-confidence in a person or distrust of professional, commercial and political system. Too much anxiety subverts the institutionalization of the risk world, economic and political motives that depend on the organized supervision of safe and risky. Risk rite depicts danger and the danger of danger as the troubles for which risk knowledge is the way out. Risk professionals take on and allocate themselves the position of ritual specialists who handle the challenge of control and anxiety through enhancing a trust in numbers alongside with a faith in those who neutrally control the figures (Crawford 2004). More notably, neither are health-conscious individuals expected to give up their personal logic of endangerment and associated demands for security in support of the assessments and plan priorities of risk professionals (Crawford 2004). Crawford (2004) says that hazard cannot foretell the unnecessary event for any particular person. If major risks are regarded as out of control, an evaluation of convenient risk factors provides slight assurance. Risk is experienced, and experience cannot be efficiently limited by the limits of ordered fraction. Health-conscious people will keep on being conscious of the rising inconsistency involving their health-protective acts and expert recommendations for the management of risk. They also continue to be confused concerning the expected conflicts over the impact of epidemiological study, particularly the one that contravenes earlier acknowledged medical truths. The effectiveness of communicating overstated danger will not be simply subordinated to the sense of control recommended by risk proportionality. Given that reliance on expert information and a mistrust of expertise are by now main sources of concern, the effort to promote the mentality to trust experts is inevitably compromised (Crawford 2004). The most possible effect of risk ritual is to strengthen accessible interest for a risk-management state among trade and industry, political and qualified elites which is a noteworthy achievement. Health-conscious people will not be recruited to risk bias, are not likely to rely professional decision making, and will surely be unwilling to cease from making their own demands for security (Crawford 2004). Crawford (2004) notes that in spite of these obstacles, the value of risk discourse for lay individuals should not be ignored. In a society premised on personal self-rule and control, risk consciousness arranges the self with certain wisdom and the cultural principal of biomedicine. If risk wisdom cannot respond to anxious questions about own fate, it none the less provides an explanation of the upcoming consistent with a sane worldview which is a moral compass for living in the current that claims to increase life-chances (Crawford 2004). According to Crawford (2004) risk does nothing to remove the previously tattered boundary involving safety and danger. As risk factors are elaborated for different categories of individuals, the region of safety reduces and, for many, disappears. The human being becomes a balance sheet of health-promoting and health-endangering variables. Destiny can be interpreted in the representation of numbers, and if the figures can be enhanced, death can be kept at bay. The availability of information and contradictory truth claims that the disharmony of hazards and the logic that dangers constantly go beyond individual attempts to manage them could be managed by participating in a representative practice that represents a risk as assessable and the rare self as able of mastery. Insecurity of modern life may be more tolerable to the point that insecurity itself becomes the object of a problem-solving method (Crawford 2004). When the social forces that decide on individual life-chances move away from the prospect of efficient, personal and political control appears gradually more distant, a remedial tactic of uncontrollability becomes more eye-catching. The Creator’s will, destiny, chance and fortune are substitute categories for interpreting actions (Crawford 2004). In reference to Crawford (2004) incapable of escaping medical understanding and mandates, health-conscious individuals are fixed in a dilemma. Health information cannot maintain trust in administration or corporations. Medical authority gets into problems when the world is occupied by medicalized uncertainty. Defiance of the laws of life as expected by the biomedical sciences engenders concern. Control and worry, an intertwine of joint growth, have become our shared destiny. III.CONCLUSION Crawford (2004) holds on the fact that the spiral of control and anxiety must be managed. Adopted as a practice by humans, risk technology is a refined way of regulation. Risk signifies a representational order of both certainty and manageability in contrast to rowdy world of anxiety and control. IV.REFERENCES Drankiewicz, D. & Dundes, L. (2003) Handwashing among female college students, Am. Jnl of Infection Control. Giddens, A. (1999) Risk and responsibility, The Modern Law Review, 62/1. Lupton. D. (2000) Food, risk and subjectivity. In S. Williams et al. (eds) Health, Medicine and Society, Routledge. Martin, E. (1998) Immunology on the street. In S. Nettleton & J. Watson (eds) The Body in Everyday Life, Routledge. Moore, S. & Burgess, A. (2010) Risk rituals?, Journal of Risk Research, 14/1. Read More