Why? There is an inherent connection between Geography and health, as our health is to some extent associated with the natural and built environments in which we work, live, and travel. An example of this is the link between location and the quality of water supplies. Therefore, we can exploit GIS to analyse spatially resolved health data.
Medical geography is the topical intersection between health phenomena and geographical methods. Health geographers, in comparison, perceive flaws in the biomedical viewpoint of medical geography as this perspective does not incorporate much social theory. Today we have a “post-medical” perspective of health geography. Some commentators suggested there were, in fact, five strands of health geography:
- Spatial patterning of disease and health (patterns of disease, views diseases as “facts” and understands related processes as ecology)
- Spatial patterning of service provision (patterns of health service facilities and utilisation, considers equity, demand and efficiency, diseases as “facts” and people as “optimisers”)
- Humanistic approaches to medical geography (looks at perception of health by laypeople in comparison to experts, illness is viewed as a social construct)
- Structuralist / materialist / critical approaches to medical geography (investigates the inequalities in health taking into consideration the structure of the social, political and economic system in place)
- Cultural approaches to medical geography (considers therapeutic landscapes and health promotion and reframing health in positive terms, culturally sensitive health practises)