The cycling of self-care through history

Public health scholar Lowell Levin described self-care as “such a common daily activity that its ubiquity may have obscured its existence and devalued its significance”. [...]medicine was professionalised, maintenance of health typically took place in an individual's home and community within intertwined relations of kinship, faith, politics, and trade. The arrival of hospital and laboratory based biomedicine in the 19th century led to a change not only in how diseases were conceived, but also in the role of health care in society. Yet with millions of people worldwide pushed into poverty each year due to out-of-pocket expenditure for health care or without access to the most essential health services, self-care continues to be important. The 2019 WHO living guideline on self-care interventions views individuals as active decision makers in their own health and describes modern evidence-based interventions that can be provided fully or partly outside of formal health services and used with or without a health worker, such as self-management of medical abortion during early pregnancy, self-monitoring of blood pressure, and home-based self-testing for some diseases.