Looking after ourselves: an individual responsibility?

Abstract

IN THE last five years there has been increasing official enthusiasm for the notion that all of us could and should improve our own health by changing our life style. This paper argues that this initiative will not only fail to lead to any significant improvement in people’s health, it is also profoundly anti-health. By ncouraging people to see their problems as their own ult, attention is distracted from the social and conomic roots of ill health and people’s confidence to challenge the societal causes of illness undermined. Lay people are interested in their own health, but will not be encouraged to take greater control over it while medical practice maintains them in a position of passivity and ignorance. If health workers want to help people to take more control over their own health, they