Symptom perception and health seeking

7 important questions on Symptom perception and health seeking

Symptom perception and help seeking

- Complex processes that have implications for our health and treatment options
- We need to pay attention to symptoms of... chest pain (to prevent myocardial infarction)
- We don't want unnecessary use of health care

Biomedical models of symptom perception

Imply a direct relationship between disease and symptom perception in that the presence of illness will directly cause bodily changes and these will be detected by the individual and perceived as indicators of illness. This model also purports that as the pathology or injury intensifies, the signs and symptoms will become more obvious and increasingly diagnostic. However, this biomedical model does not reflect the true nature of symptom perception.

- correlation between physioogical states and symptoms is low

Awareness of somatic information

- even people with chronic diseases are often unable to monitor the crucial signs of their disease (necessary for disease management)

- results from a combination of 2 processes
- data driven (bottom-up)
- conceptually driven (top-down)
    
Data driven perception relates to the quality and quantity of incoming information.

Conceptually driven perception refers to the influence of cognitions
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Process of symptom interpretation

We label somatic information and we then attribute it to something. The cognitive-perceptual process of symptom interpretation is subject ot a multitude of psychological, social and contextual influences. (psychophysiological comparison theory; Cacioppo)

Help seeking and delay

- Perceptions of signs and symptoms are necessary but not sufficient for help seeking.

There is patient delay between detection of signs and first consultation with health care provider, and professinal delay between consultation and receipt of definitive diagnosis.

Patient delay + professional delay = diagnostic/total delay.

Patient delay is generally the longest.

Why do people delay seeking help?

- Patients with multiple or severe symptoms will seek help more promptly (according to biomedical approach!--> too simplistic; other explanations are needed to aid our understanding of help-seeking decisions)
- However, the quantity and severity of symptoms explain only a small amount of variance in patient delay.

help seeking behaviour:
1. dispositional approach
2. health-care system approach
3. psychosocial approach

Dispositional approach (help seeking behaviour)

Disposition = gezindheid;aard;aanleg

- This maintains that we have stable patterns of health/illness behaviour
- some people rarely visit doctors, others always do
- however, help-seeking appears to rely on more complex processes than disposition   

Women are more likely to report symptoms, to visit a doctor when they are ill and have higher rates of health-care utilisation for most health-care services. Young children and the elderly have more contact with the medical profession than adolescents and young adults.

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