Cultural and socio-economic factors in health, health services and prevention for indigenous people

Summary: Indigenous people across the world experience more health related problems as compared to the population at large. So, this review article is broadly an attempt to highlight the important factors for indigenous peoples’ health problems, and to recommend some suggestions to improve their health status. Standard database for instance, Pubmed, Medline, Google scholar, and Google book searches have been used to get the sources. Different key words, for example, indigenous people and health, socio-economic and cultural factors of indigenous health, history of indigenous peoples’ health, Australian indigenous peoples’ health, Latin American indigenous peoples’ health, Canadian indigenous peoples’ health, South Asian indigenous peoples’ health, African indigenous peoples’ health, and so on, have been used to find the articles and books. This review paper shows that along with commonplace factors, indigenous peoples’ health is affected by some distinctive factors such as indigeneity, colonial and post-colonial experience, rurality, lack of governments’ recognition etc., which nonindigenous people face to a much lesser degree. In addition, indigenous peoples around the world experience various health problems due to their varied socio-economic and cultural contexts. Finally, this paper recommends that the spiritual, physical, mental, emotional, cultural, economic, socio-cultural and environmental factors should be incorporated into the indigenous health agenda to improve their health status.