Medical professionals must seriously consider people’s beliefs and cultural practices: expert

Cristine H. Legare, professor of psychology, speaking at the the Sundaram Fasteners Lecture Series 5th Edition on Friday.
| Photo Credit: S.R. RAGHUNATHAN

Public health professionals should give serious consideration to people’s beliefs, behaviours, and cultural practices, Cristine H. Legare, professor of psychology, founder and director, Center for Applied Cognitive Science, University of Texas, said on Friday.

Delivering a lecture on ‘Leveraging the Power of Ritual to Improve Health Outcomes’ at the Sundaram Fasteners Lecture Series 5^th Edition, organised by The Banyan and Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health, she said medical practitioners should develop a deep understanding of traditional health practices, acknowledge their challenges, and recognise the answers that lie in the comprehensive understanding of these practices. “Imposing biomedicine without considering the cultural ecology of health, food, beliefs, and practices is highly unlikely to succeed,” Dr. Legare added.

Dr. Legare, who has researched on the perinatal journey of women in Bihar, said rituals were the behavioural grammar of our species, socially stipulated group conventions, and collective property of communities. Rituals serve social functions in human groups, drive cultural transmission intergenerationally, she added.

During a panel discussion following the lecture, K. Sujatha Rao, former Union Secretary of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, said while rituals, such as the seemantham for pregnant women in Tamil Nadu, were observed in various communities, it was challenging for public policy to integrate faith and beliefs and scale them up as official policies. This was because such integration required clear, evidence-based proof of positive outcomes with no negative consequences.

She said not all rituals yielded positive results. Public health is largely driven by behavioral change, but rituals must be clearly defined and critically examined through research to determine their effectiveness, Dr. Rao added.