This sad article from the New York Times talks about the relationship between culture and health that we have discussed recently in class. The article was written by a Boston pediatrician who was working at a hospital in Haiti when he was faced with trying to save a five-month-old boy who weighed less than four and a half pounds due to severe diarrhea and malnutrition. The boy's mother considered herself to have "bad milk" and was therefore bottle feeding the baby with watered-down 7Up. The boy didn't survive. Here is an instance where the mother was probably doing what she felt was best for the child in not "poisoning" him with her breast milk which was culturally considered bad. At first glance, we might tend to wonder how someone could make such a mistake. With some thought, however, it is easy to see that culture plays a huge role in our own ideas of sickness and health. For example, a single poorly-run study by a doctor who is now banned from practicing medicine showed a link between autism and childhood vaccines. Nearly twenty studies have since proved the link to be false, but suspicion about childhood vaccines still seems to be lingering. The idea that cold temperatures cause illness and that chicken noodle soups help colds are also cultural ideas about illness. What if any of these cultural conceptions (especially concerning the vaccinations) were to be very harmful to society's health? We would have much the same problems as the misconceptions about breast feeding are causing in Haiti. This is yet another reason to realize that culture must be respected and it emphasizes the importance of understanding a culture's role in lifestyles and health decision making.
This article is so sad to me because it's not an instance of the mother no caring about her child, it's exactly the opposite: she cared for her child so much that she went along with cultural understandings to help him, which ultimately led to his death. I feel like there are so many social stigmas surrounding breastfeeding that I wonder where they all originated from. I know that we discussed that Nestle was responsible for some of them, but it seems like there have to be even more forces driving all of the problems around this issue. If you can get to the root of these, then it will start to be easier to break down the cultural problems surrounding mothers not breastfeeding.
ReplyDeleteThis article is truly upsetting to me. As mentioned above, this mother cared so much for her child and really believed she was making the right choice for him. I think that this story, along with many others just proves how significant cultural barriers are to the practice and success of global health initiatives. As we talked about in class, these cultural barriers must be fully understood before any successful intervention could be made. This makes me question, if these things seem so abnormal and foreign to us, how can we go about predicting cultural aspects that could be potential barriers? Is there any way to address all possible cultural barriers during intervention or is it just something we will always have to deal with as the situations come about? I think that if we are able to predict these possible relevant cultural barriers for our intervention, possibly through an intense pre-study of the target culture, we would be better able to create effective interventions.
ReplyDeleteThe mother's choice reflects an educational barrier as well as a cultural one. It seems that it is easier to transcend cultural differences in health perceptions within an education community. That is likely because rethinking preconceived notions is a key component to education. I think about how our course work has trained us to look at a piece of information, create assumptions about that information, and then use new data to challenge the assumptions we formulated. For this mother who may have never developed the skill of thinking critically about her ideas and the ideas of others, it would be difficult to incite her to change her habits even if with evidence about the danger of maintaining a newborn on a diet of carbonated sugar-water.
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