Our goal is to influence the larger conversation around public health to include CCH considerations that lead to better outcomes. The Vanderbilt Cultural Contexts of Health and Wellbeing Initiative (VU-CCH) builds on this work to conceptualize and operationalize a model of cultural contexts built from global examples but adapted to the U.S. WHO/Europe has developed an innovative approach to CCH in the context of the European region. ![]() A cultural contexts of health approach offers forms of engagement that are both more effective and more sustainable than biomedical approaches alone. Seeing culture as a dynamic set of shared values, we can understand “it” not as an obstacle, but as a source of possibilities and potential. This view usually associates “culture” with geographically bounded ethnic groups defined by lists of traits. In health policy, we often talk about “overcoming” or “breaking down” cultural conceptions that are seen as obstacles to healthcare. ![]() German pioneer Rudolph Virchow declared that “medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine at a large scale.” A Cultural Context of Health and Wellbeing (CCH) approach extends Virchow’s observation to the realm of culture, looking beneath surface manifestations to address the underlying values and conventions that manifest in drive and behavior. Public health was born in the nineteenth century of the recognition that treating pandemics and other widespread illnesses requires looking beyond individual biological symptoms to the structures and environments that produce them.
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