McGrath Pam, Holewa Hamish, Ogilvie Katherine, Rayner Robert, Patton Mary Anne
International Program of Psycho-Social Health Research, Central Queensland University, Brisbane Office, Kenmore QLD, Australia.
Contemp Nurse. 2006 Sep;22(2):240-54. doi: 10.5172/conu.2006.22.2.240.
Although the incidence of cancer in Indigenous peoples is similar to its incidence in the overall Australian population, Indigenous peoples are less likely to access early detection and medical interventions resulting in higher mortality and morbidity rates. To explore and address this discrepancy, the National Health and Medical Research Council funded a research study to examine Indigenous peoples' views of cancer and cancer treatments with an end goal of developing an innovative model of Indigenous Palliative Care. Seventy-two participants were interviewed from four geographical areas within the Northern Territory (Australia) including patients, caregivers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous health care workers, and interpreters. Indigenous peoples' views of cancer have to be examined within a historical, socio-political, and cultural context. There is no Indigenous word for cancer and the Western biomedical language that semantically constructs the notion of cancer is not widely understood. Additionally, for many Indigenous people, the aetiology of cancer is embedded in beliefs about the spiritual world of curses and payback from perceived misdeeds. The paper advocates for cross-cultural education initiatives, stressing the importance of a two way education strategy incorporating a process whereby medical and nursing personnel would improve their understanding of Indigenous peoples' view of cancer and Indigenous peoples would learn more about prevention and treatment of cancer from a biomedical perspective.
尽管原住民的癌症发病率与澳大利亚总体人口的发病率相似，但原住民获得早期检测和医疗干预的可能性较小，这导致了更高的死亡率和发病率。为了探索并解决这一差异，澳大利亚国家卫生与医学研究委员会资助了一项研究，以调查原住民对癌症和癌症治疗的看法，最终目标是开发一种创新的原住民姑息治疗模式。研究人员从澳大利亚北领地的四个地理区域采访了72名参与者，包括患者、护理人员、原住民和非原住民医护人员以及口译员。原住民对癌症的看法必须在历史、社会政治和文化背景下进行审视。在原住民语言中没有表示癌症的词汇，而且语义上构建癌症概念的西方生物医学语言也未被广泛理解。此外，对许多原住民来说，癌症的病因根植于关于诅咒的精神世界以及因被认为的恶行而遭受报应的信仰之中。本文倡导开展跨文化教育倡议，强调双向教育策略的重要性，该策略应包含一个过程，即医护人员增进对原住民对癌症看法的理解，而原住民从生物医学角度更多地了解癌症的预防和治疗。
