Research and Demonstration Issues in Self-Care: Measuring the Decline of Medicocentrism

Abstract

Emergence of consumer health self-care is a reflection of the increased commitment of health professionals to patient education, growing consumer awareness that they are capable of sophisticated self-help, and a variety of social, economic and technological currents. These currents are reviewed and a survey of existing medical self-care programs is summarized The attempts and potentials to evaluate these programs are critically examined A number of important research and demonstration issues are raised including the determination of behavioral outcomes, technical limits, and manpower implications. A federal program of replicative studies on such issues would provide substantive knowledge in the self-care field, generalizable to the larger field of health education, but the hazards of undermining the voluntaristic and non-establish ment character of the programs must be considered in designing evaluative studies.