February 15, 2020
In this lecture we discussed the linkages between geography and health, health geographies importance and past, the five perspectives, and their similarities and differences.
The geography of health is important because health is an important factor in development as there is a correlation between income and welfare, and infectious disease may arise due to clime change but studying the geographical spread is key for their control. Overall, social and behaviour factors contribute more to health outcomes than clinical factors, which means that local geography plays a major role in individual health. For instance, a very early study found that people living at low elevations were more prone to malaria, while another study found an 19 year gap in life expectancy in Baltimore depending on what county one was born in.
Thus, medical geography applies the concepts and techniques of geography to the perspectives and methods of health, disease, and health care. The five perspectives of health geography are: spatial patterning of disease and health, spatial patterning of service provision, humanistic approaches to ‘medical geography’, structuralist/materialist/critical approaches to ‘medical geography’, and cultural approaches to ‘medical geography’. Each perspective has its own approaches and assumptions, their similarities lie in the role that place and space play in health. However, there are two distinct fields: geographical epidemiology and geography of health care. Health geographers tend to emphasize place (not space), local scale and contexts, qualitative methodology, and rooted in social theory.