ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the public debates about the health requirements of Bangladeshis principally, but not exclusively, in the borough of Tower Hamlets in London. I will argue that these debates have largely defined and treated Bangladeshi health needs in terms of formal health resources, quantitative data and biomedical models of disease, so while concerned with serious disabilities and health problems, remedies are sought only from within the professional structure of health provision. The beliefs and practices of ‘ordinary people’, such as Bangladeshi residents, are not sought and do not inform the debate. Such a failure to learn about Bangladeshi beliefs and practices continues a long-established and complex pattern. As Cornwell and Donovan have shown in their studies of health and illness among East London’s residents, the distance between health professionals and patients is created by a system of knowledge and power where differences between people are reinforced by class and gender as well as ethnicity and race.1 Similarly, repeated calls for improved health education, however well intentioned, fail to show an awareness of the crucial role played by non-medical discourses and practices among those whom health professionals wish to help. Without a real engagement with local people’s beliefs and coping strategies, the delivery of more resources and schemes developed by health professionals also tend to proffer a one-sided solution.
