Spiritual_Wellness_Holistic_Health_and_the_Practic

264 Philosophical Foundations of Health Education
There are at least two requirements of an empowerment ideology. On the one hand,
it demands that we look to many diverse local settings where people are already handling
their own problems in living . On the other hand, it demands that we find ways
to take what we learn and make it more, rather than less, likely that others not now
handling their own problems in living, or shut out from current solutions, gain control
over their lives. (1985, p. 18; emphasis added)
By incorporating concepts of power and empowerment into its analysis and repertoire
of strategies, the new health promotion movement has helped to move the field
beyond the victim blaming rhetoric that often has accompanied the lifestyle approach.
At the same time, however, the new health promotion has tended to cast the notion of
empowerment as meaning that nothing short of collective political action counts as a
legitimate health promotion strategy. In so doing, it has tended to ignore or disregard
the multidimensionality of power — the earlier discussed essential interdependence
between individual empowerment and empowerment at a more political level. As Shor
and Freire (1987) point out:
While individual empowerment, the feeling of being changed, is not enough
concerning the transformation of the whole society, it is absolutely necessary for the
process of social transformation. The critical development of [people] is absolutely
fundamental for the radical transformation of society … but it is not enough by itself.
(p. 6)
Labonte (1989, 1990b) and Jackson, Mitchell, and Wright (1989) have discussed
in detail this notion of the multidimensionality of empowerment in terms of an empowerment
continuum. Empowerment can occur at many levels from personal empowerment
through community organization to political action. What this continuum implies
is that for an individual to join a smoking cessation program and succeed in quitting
smoking may be as empowering for that individual as a community taking action to
prohibit cigarette advertising on its local billboards may be for the community.
What the empowerment continuum also means is that not all health promotion
practitioners necessarily have to work at all points on the empowerment continuum for
their work to be constituted as empowering. To politicize health and health promotion
strategies, as the new health promotion movement tends to do, does not mean that only
political action now constitutes health promotion; it means framing health problems
and their solutions in their social, political, and economic context. One ’ s practice can be
at the individual level — nutrition education classes for teenage mothers, for example —
and be empowering.
The importance of recognizing and acknowledging the empowering potential of
effective health promotion practice, including direct services on the individual level, is
underscored further when we recall the potential misuse of the notion of empowerment
to cut back or delegitimate the provision of such services. In the United States,
for example, some conservative policy makers and organizations have combined the
notion of empowerment with the political ideology of personal responsibility to