While the substantial literature on lay health beliefs gives some
consideration
to older people's conceptions of health and illness, it is material
which has yet
to be examined from the perspective of postmodern theory. This article,
therefore, critically examines the value of using ideas from postmodernism
in
such a context and focuses on data obtained from a series of in-depth
interviews with a sample of fifteen older people. During the interviews
they
were asked to talk about themselves in relation to issues which included
health,
illness, disease, death and dying. What they said revealed that, while
medicine
remained a location of power and knowledge, many of their health beliefs
were
nonetheless at odds with conventional medicine and indeed with the
traditionally passive role of the NHS patient. In conclusion, we suggest
that,
whilst not always in an explicit or conscious sense, interviewees were
discovering self-empowering strategies by questioning the meta-narratives
through which the social world is fabricated.