The Health Concept in the Complementary Medicine

Health is defined from current academy concepts and then is compared with the complementary medicine professional’s definition. In order to compare analysis of discourse of professional from Ciudad de México y Seville is carried out focusing in their complementary health cultural framework. The preliminary results show a positive and multidimensional concept of health and currently it is working finishing the analysis and reporting the conclusions.

Keywords:Complementary Medicine; Health Models; Qualitative Research.

The subject of this qualitative research has been to know what is meant by health for professionals in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). The fieldwork has been doing between the years 2014-2017. During this period, twenty-five in-depth interviews were conducted with professionals in the CAM field, whose areas of interest are those shown in [table 1]. The research design has been exploratory-descriptive and flexible [1, 2], which has allowed the incorporation of new categories of data [3], that is, new informants with new contributions where the design needed it. As well the flexible design has allowed including new “space of attributes” in the initial sample design [4,5].

[Table 1]

The interviews have been carried out to professionals from Mexico City (Mexico) and from the city of Seville (Spain). Why? It starts from the methodological assumption that the territory does not differentiate the discourses, but it starts from the assumption that the formation of any concept is connected to cultural frameworks that allow a complete objectification of the experience [6]. The cultural framework where the concepts are attached transcends merely geographical borders, since the corpus of beliefs, expressions, norms, etc., is subject to the practice of CAM, regardless of where it is practiced.

The theoretical frame of the research establishes a descriptive research hypothesis: it focuses on examining the presence of similarities and differences between the predominant concept of health and that held by the interviewees. Therefore, what exists is compared with what is reported in the interviews. To this end a bibliographic review of the concept of health managed in the scientific community is made to make the comparison possible.

The preliminary results of the analysis of the interviews show that CAM professionals have a multidimensional concept of health, similar to that described by authors such as [7-11]. The discourses of professionals allow inferring seven analytical categories in the definition of health presented in image 1: balance, group, agency, well-being, holism, awareness and emotions. The analysis is

currently still carried out with the help of ATLAS. Program, defining each of these categories according to the words of the interviewees and trying to show a theoretical construct of the concept of health based on the saturation of the discourses. Likewise, it will be verified if the methodological assumption of the territory differentiates the discourses or instead the cultural framework makes them similar [12,13].

[Image 1 & Table 1]

Table 1: Distribution of ever-married females by age group and gravida and para, Kampung Peninjau Lama, December 2013.

None.

All authors declare no potential conflict.

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