Symptom perception and health seeking
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Symptom perception and help seeking
- 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
- correlation between physioogical states and symptoms is low
Awareness of somatic information
- 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
Help seeking and delay
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?
- 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)
- 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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