Self-care or Delay in Seeking Healthcare: Reflections from the Field

Self-care is an integral part of promotive, preventive, curative, and rehabilitative care and offers unique opportunities to keep ourselves healthy; it is also considered as a renewed approach to primary healthcare (WHO 2009). However, the tension between self-care and state-delivered primary healthcare has not been sufficiently addressed (Levin and Idler 1983), which raises scepticism about promoting self-care as a practice. Hence, there is a need to reflect on what is self-care, whom it is for, to what extent it should be followed, and its position within the health system (Webber, Guo, and Mann 2013). In low- and middle-income (LMIC) countries like India, traditional medicine is considered an important resource for population health, especially primary healthcare (Oyebode et al. 2016). Homemakers play a significant role in the prevention of many diseases and the promotion of health through their nutrition-based interventions. Intergenerational knowledge regarding the use of traditional medicine potentially adds value to self-care as it can help in making better-informed decisions.