Socio-cultural and Biomedical Beliefs for Causalities and Healing of Diabetic Mellitus Around the Globe: Systematic Review 2021.

Abstract

Diabetic mellitus is the main public health problem nowadays, and the burden is higher in developing countries. Different anthropologic literatures were published to integrate socio-cultural beliefs and biomedical practice for managing diabetes mellitus. The current study reviews anthropology perspectives on diabetic mellitus and the relationship between health, socio-cultural beliefs and biomedicine using literature around the globe. This review included published studies in electronic databases such as Pubmed, World Wide Science and Google scholar. Published studies from the search database were exported to reference manager software, Endnote version 7, to remove duplicate studies. We screened the title and abstract, then the full text per settled inclusion criteria, followed by a full-text review to find eligible studies. Studies without abstract and/or full text, unspecified reports, viewpoints and any systematic reviews and meta-analyses were excluded. The protocol for this review was sent for registration on the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (PROSPERO), registration number CRD 237899. The search has been collected a total of 72 studies in the world. Five articles were excluded due to duplication in each database. About 47 articles and 15 articles were excluded based on the title and abstract screen, respectively. After full-text reviews were assessed, one article was removed due to that comparative study, and finally, we have approved only 4 articles for systematic review. The review identified those beliefs about socio-cultural, spiritual and biomedical aspects of the causalities, symptoms, and treatment. As there were limited studies worldwide, we extracted data from a few countries, including Ethiopia. Almost all studies identified the sociocultural causalities of diabetes mellitus as "hereditary, uncertainty, feeding habit and GOD." The socio-cultural beliefs of healing are also summarized as "GOD allows holy water in Ethiopia only by orthodox Christians, traditional plants like Shiferaw or moringa also believed only in Ethiopia study, exercise, diet selection." All studies found that biomedical regimens were believed to bring healing congruent with socio-cultural beliefs.