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Accepted Paper:

Towards a healthier future: young Indigenous people's health seeking behaviour and their interaction with the health system  
Mascha Friderichs (Menzies School of Health Research)

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I discuss how young Indigenous women in a regional town in the Northern Territory think about health and engage with the health system, recognising that health beliefs and health care providers cannot be categorised as belonging to the traditional or biomedical system exclusively.

Paper long abstract:

Research on Aboriginal health often either focuses on traditional health beliefs or comes from a biomedical perspective. However, health beliefs and health care providers cannot easily be categorised as belonging to one of these systems exclusively. In this paper I discuss how young Indigenous women in a regional town in the Northern Territory think about health and engage with the health system. While the young women define health mainly as healthy eating and doing enough exercise, thus showing knowledge of the biomedical standard health message, their ideas about health are more broad. Traditional healing still happens and bush medicine is occasionally used. This is not just practical, knowing about it is also part of people's identity, which in turn influences their mental health. While the local Aboriginal Medical Service provides biomedical care, and as such does not distinguish itself from other health services, it is seen as good for other, both practical and symbolic, reasons. For service providers working with young Indigenous women, it is important that they neither assume that they are completely Westernised, nor essentialise their Indigenous identity.

Panel Med02
Indigenous youth futures in the Northern territory: living the social determinants of health
  Session 1