Aboriginal Health Issues

Different people and communities throughout the world differ among their ethnographic perspective of ways health is perceived and how willing an individual is to seek help regarding personal health. Authors Kate Senior and Richard Chenhall studied the different ways individuals living in an Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory of Australia called, River Town, perceive health care and take initiative and responsibility for their own health. This article sets out to examine the different aspects of the lives of the aborigines and their relationship with the local health clinic to better understand why the community has such bad health problems, and whether the Aboriginal people should be blamed for their overall poor health.

This aboriginal

These quotes allow the reader comprehend the various opinions of healthcare from the members of the river Town community. The authors present their findings in a well-structured article that begins by giving an introduction about the health of Aborigines in River Town. Following the introduction, the findings of the study are presented in multiple sections with a conclusion to the study at the end. The most interesting aspect of this article to me was the belief in sorcery among the Aborigines. Sorcery is a subject that I know nothing about, but I was interested to learn many Aborigines believe that an evil source was the cause of certain illnesses such as chest pains and mental health problems. This example shows the vast ethnographical difference between the Aborigines and myself because the belief in sorcery in the community I live is non-existent to my knowledge. This is an informative article for an anthropologist to read to learn more about the cultural attitudes and behaviors towards personal health and healthcare of an Aboriginal community in Northern Australia. Another aspect that could have been studied by the researchers would have been different behaviors and beliefs toward healthcare between different age demographics. Since the community was studied as a whole, age difference was not mentioned in the article. These findings would have allowed the health clinic to know which age demographic is most opposed to biomedical treatments and at most risk of disease and