Health geography

Health geography is the application of geographical information, perspectives, and methods to the study of health, disease, and health care. Medical geography, a sub-discipline of or sister field of health geography, focuses on understanding spatial patterns of health and disease as related to the natural and social environment. Conventionally, there are two primary areas of research within medical geography: the first deals with the spatial distribution and determinants of morbidity and mortality, while the second deals with health planning, help-seeking behavior, and the provision of health services. The first area of study within medical geography has been described as geographical epidemiology or disease geography and is focused on the spatial patterns and processes of health and disease outcomes. This area of inquiry can be differentiated from the closely related discipline of epidemiology in that it uses concepts and methods from geography, allowing an ecologic perspective on health that considers how interactions between humans and the environment result in observed health outcomes. The second area of study focused on the planning and provision of health services, often with a focus on the spatial organization of health systems and exploration of how this arrangement affects accessibility of care. The study of health geography has been influenced by repositioning medical geography within the field of social geography due to a shift towards a social model in health care, rather than a medical model. This advocates for the redefinition of health and health care away from prevention and treatment of illness only to one of promoting well-being in general. Under this model, some previous illnesses (e.g., mental ill health) are recognized as behavior disturbances only, and other types of medicine (e.g., complementary or alternative medicine and traditional medicine) are studied by the medicine researchers, sometimes with the aid of health geographers without medical education.