An examination of Changing Treatment and Disease among the Bedar Tribe of Karnataka -India

The plight of tribal people has drawn increasing policy attention since 1940. Today majority of tribal people are suffering with various communicable and non communicable diseases. It is stated there is a positive correlation between the health status of the tribal people and their social, economical and cultural background. Anthropologists have conducted various studies on culturally bounded health behavior among various tribal settings and found that tribal health culture is a part of sub-culture with in a totally of population. This health culture will be a wider complex of the knowledge including roles, norms, values ideologies, practices, rituals, etiology, lock healers etc. All these together responsible for having particular type of health behavior in case of tribes. Health culture of tribal society is not easily influencing by the various external agencies so that tribal health culture is developing and maintaining its own distinctive practice. Over the last few decades various Indian governments have developed plans to achieve long term goals to provide a compressive health care programme for the tribal people. However, result is not encouraging. This study has been conducted on changing health behavior of elderly population of Bedar tribal group of Karnataka and found that unique health behavior amongst the studied tribe.