Hälsoresan : Patienter och patientperspektiv på hälsohemmet Föllingegården 1976–1990

Sammanfattning: In the 1970s and 1980s, Sweden held about 15-20 certified health resorts that wanted to improve peoples’ health with vegetarian food and alternative medicine. This essay aims to explore the popularity of health resorts through a patient’s perspective. What did the patients look for at the resort, which they could not find in the official health care? A basis for the analysis is Bonnie Blair O´Connor’s theory of Health Belief Systems. In short, it claims that all medical systems are equal, from a patient’s point of view. A patient in the 1970s and 1980s could turn to the Health Belief System of conventional medicine, or chose an alternative – for example the Health Belief System constituted by Swedish health resorts. The material for this survey comes from one of the most famous health resorts in Sweden, Föllingegården in the north of Jämtland. From 1976 to 1990 Mrs Lilly Johansson, who advocated a very strictly vegetarian diet to people with various health problems, ran the resort. The archives of Föllingegården have recently been discovered, and this is the first time someone looks at the patients’ bookings, journals and letters. The survey reveals that about three quarters of the patients were women, that the average patient was about 50 years old, and that he or she was most likely to be a white-collar worker. About half of the patients were explicitly ill, and suffered from different kinds of aches, rheumatism, allergies, eczema, bowel problems or other chronic disease. In their anamnesis, and in evaluation forms concerning their stay at Föllingegården, the patients reveal their motifs for coming to the health resort. Many of them had been let down by conventional health care. They were tired of heavy medication and/or careless doctors. At the health resort, they searched for a more personal contact with their healer and a more natural way of curing diseases and improve health. This essay shows that patients in the 1970s and 1980s contributed to the popularity of health resorts by trusting the health resorts with a wide range of health problems, by persuading doctors of the official health care to refer to and finance their stay at the health resort, and by taking responsibility for their own health in an era when official health care started to prove insufficient.