| Abstract: | The enterprise of health promotion in medicine involves a responsibilityof distinguishing between the concepts of health and absenceof disease and of reflecting on the notions of illness and sickness.In this paper the importance of human dialogue is stressed bothas a means and end of the doctor-patient relationship and asthe main means of genuine health promotion. The outcome of healthwork is proposed to depend mainly on the way the patients areencountered. Their efforts to make themselves seen as beingsick should not on all occasions be diagnosed and treated. Bymeans of a reflected, dialogic practice patients may be listenedto and inspired to reconstruct their symbol-based relationshipto the world of meaning. The conception of health primarilyincludes man's relationship to himself. Illness is looked uponas the subject's experience of illhealth, whereas disease isunderstood as a functional imbalance of bodily organs. Thereis a tacit meaning in being ill (and found sick) that can berealized and attended to best in close relationship with thepatient. Physicians – preferably general practitioners– involved in health promotion should, it is concluded,both assist the patients to give up their sick role and continuallyelaborate their own professional competence to see and successfullyencounter the manifold specifically human issues underlyingtheir patients' presented symptoms. |
