Culturally embedded health beliefs, self-care and the use of anti-ageing medicine among Australian and Japanese older adults.

ABSTRACT

Adopting Kleinman's and Lock's ideas that there are cultural variations in understandings of health care and the medicalisation of ageing bodies, this study compares and contrasts older adults' use of anti-ageing medicine in two cultural settings. Based on 42 interviews conducted in Australia and Japan with adults aged 60 and over, findings revealed distinct pathways to initiating anti-ageing medicine use between the two cohorts which reflect different attitudes to the medicalisation of ageing in the two settings. In Australia where consultation of medical doctors for major and minor ailments is routine for many older adults, supplement use was initiated on doctor's advice, or reactionary, in that dissatisfaction with doctors' advice was the impetus. By contrast, many Japanese elders did not seek the advice of medical practitioners for minor health issues, considering them instead to be part of a natural process of ageing, and viewed their supplement use as co-extensive with their use of Shokuji-ryohou or a traditional corrective diet. Despite these cultural differences, both the Australian and Japanese elders resisted more extreme manifestations of the biomedicalisation of ageing and took anti-ageing medicine to ward off the perceived danger of surgery in later life.