Self-Care in Bangladesh: Local Level Resilience and Risk Reduction

An interest in human coping applicable to endemic disease environments, such as those occurring in Bangladesh, has identified the pivotal role played by local level disease resilience and risk reduction strategies. These approaches resonate strongly with the concept of self-care, a ubiquitous and multidimensional construct that encompasses the actions individuals take to stay healthy and manage minor and/or chronic conditions. The extent of self-care as a predominant response to ill health throughout the global north has been well documented, with a burgeoning body of evidence capturing self-care in the global south. This has drawn attention to the concept as a primary public health resource. Despite this, a lack of insight remains into how self-care is implemented as part of resilience and risk-reduction strategies among communities living within endemic disease environments. Therefore, this chapter discusses theses issues, and drawing on research from Bangladesh, advocates the role self-care can play in resilience to disease and its effectiveness as a disease risk-reduction strategy. As such self-care could provide a mechanism for achieving better disease mitigation and low-cost health responses without overriding the necessary structural changes that offer the potential to achieve improved disease management for the poor of Bangladesh.