Write a short note on Local Health Traditions.

Apart from AYUSH, there are other local medical practices, especially

adopted by the rural people, and vary from region to region. These are known as

Local Health Traditions (LHT). Local health traditions refer to health promotion,

prevention, and curative methods having general acceptance and prevalence among

households of different socio-economic strata. They share common roots with the

indigenous textual systems, but also differ from them in some ways. Each household

practices the traditions as home remedies or through the services of various

traditional and folk practitioners. They are time tested traditions with no legal

sanction. Other than the home remedies, various forms of informal providers via

Traditional Health Practitioners (THP), Folk Healers (FoH), Faith Healers (FH),

Dais and Traditional Birth Attendants (TBAs) are catering to masses' health needs.

How does allopathic medicine differ from traditional forms of medicine?

India is culturally rich. She can boast of having many traditional forms of medicine

that look at health, disease and its causes in a unique way. The main focus of the

Indian system of medicine or alternative medicine, as it is best known, is on holistic

health and well-being of humans.

Write a short note on fatalism and health.

Fatalism is a concept which combines belief in God, attributes of irrational practices

such as superstitions or religious prescriptions. The remedy for a disease caused

by God is simple: people promise to offer things to God which they like best, for

example, their hair, their children, and even if God is not the cause of illness. He

may be prayed to help in curing it. Therefore, a person may go to the temple and

pray to God for relief from illness. After the ailment is cured he/she will visit the

temple once again and give thanks to God along with offerings. Besides, whenever

disease is perceived as a result of failure to fulfill obligations to God, the patient

will go to the temple and try to improve his/her relations with God. Often a priest

prescribes the means necessary to rectify these relations (Djurfeldt and Lindberg,

1975).

Discuss the genesis of health

The preoccupation with health and disease has existed since ancient times, although,

the use of the word 'health' to describe human 'wellbeing' is relatively recent. It has

its origins in an old English word 'health', which meant a state ofbeing sound, and

was generally used to infer a soundness of the body Before Hippocrates (c 460-

377 BC) health was perceived as a divine gift. Hippocrates shifted the focus from

divine notions of health, and used observation as a basis for acquiring health

knowledge. He encouraged a focus on environmental sanitation, personal hygiene

and, in particular, balanced diets—"let food be thy medicine; and let thy medicine be

food". He theorized that 'health' might be defined as the extent of a delicate balance

of four fluids: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and-ph legiri. 111 health, he believed,

resulted from an imbalance ofthese fluids. A divine view ofhealth persists to this era.

For example, Prophet Mohammed's view of health, sickness and death—and

followed by practicing Muslims worldwide— may be inferred from the following

verse in the Holy Koran, "The Lord of the worlds; it is He who heals me when Jam

sick, and He who would cause me to die and live again" (Koran, 26:80).

With only simple technology, our ancestors could do little to improve health.

Hunters and gatherers faced frequent food shortages, which sometimes forced

mothers to abandon their children. Those lucky enough to survive infancy were

still vulnerable to injury and illness, so half died by the age of twenty and few lived

to the age of forty (Nolan and Lenski, 1999; Scmpin, 2000).

As societies developed agriculture, food became abundant. Social inequality

also increased, the elite enjoyed better health than the peasants and slaves, who

lived in crowded, unsanitary shelters and oflen"went hungry. As cities grew in medieval

Europe, human waste and other refuse.pileclup in the streets, spreading infectious

diseases and plagues that periodically wiped out entire towns (Muniford, 1961).

Define Health according to WHO.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defined health in its broader sense in its 1948 constitution as "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity."

What do you mean by social well being?

Well-being, wellbeing,^[1] welfare or wellness is a general term for the condition of an individual or group, for example their social, economic, psychological, spiritual or medical state; a high level of well-being means in some sense the individual or group's experience is positive, while low well-being is associated with negative happenings.
In economics, the term is used for one or more quantitative measures intended to assess the quality of life of a group, for example, in the capabilities approach and the economics of happiness. As with the related cognate terms 'wealth' and 'welfare', economics sources often contrast the state with its opposite.^[2] The study of well-being is divided into subjective well-being and objective well-being.

Define mental health.

Mental health is a level of psychological well-being, or an absence of a mental disorder; it is the "psychological state of someone who is functioning at a satisfactory level of emotional and behavioral adjustment".