Concepts of disease causation, treatment and prevention among Hong Kong Chinese: Diversity and eclecticism

Abstract

The health beliefs, knowledge, and choices of therapautic intervention for 25 common ailments were described and analyzed for the Chinese in Hong Kong. Acceptance of the co-existence of the ideas and treatment regimens from both Western and Chinese medical traditions were prevalent. For health problems in which Western medicine has already isolated a specific causative agent or developed effective treatment or preventive methods, many informants were familiar with these biomedical concepts, and even more expressed willingness to use these methods to alleviate their symptoms. In addition, however, there was a group of views on causation, treatment, and prevention that arose from folk observations or Chinese classical medicine that supplemented the views imported from the West. This occurred when the etiological factors for specific health problems were not well understood or identified in biomedicine, or when other environmental factors, usually attributed to ‘lifestyle’, were identified by informants as mediating factors affecting risk for disease from the individual's point of view. These latter views helped explain why some become ill and others do not, although all may have been exposed to the same etiological agent identified in biomedicine.