Putting chronic illness ‘in place’. Women immigrants' accounts of their health care

Abstract

This paper discusses the ways in which first generation Canadian women of Vancouver's Chinese and South Asian communities manage their chronic illness. The study reported was concerned with the women's experiences of health care encounters in hospitals and clinics, and their subsequent incorporation or modification of biomedical knowledge as they managed the day-to-day consequences of their illness. The paper presents a critique of culturalist explanations of personal health care practices, through an ethnographic account of the women's institutional and occupational emplacement and their racialized experience of place. In the study women's accounts of their illness and its management indicated a search for the alleviation of symptoms that involved a plurality of illness management strategies. The women's health care practices were mediated by local social networks and a distribution of non-medical resources rooted in the process of ‘place’, in addition to specific barriers to the use of biomedical techniques. The study suggests that inquiry into problems of health care for minority population groups needs to go beyond a narrow focus on biomedical services, and analysis must be wary of attributing primacy to untheorized concepts of culture, ethnicity or ‘race’ in explanation.