Self-care in health promotion.

About 10 years ago academics discovered the fact that people actually take care of themselves. This was a process rather reminiscent of the academic discovery of poverty in the sixties [1. Poverty Studies in the Sixties. A Selected and Annotated Bibliography. U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Washington, D.C., 1970]. Like poverty, self-care had 'always been with us', but it had not been deemed worthy of scientific interest. Not only did this expose a gap within sociological research on health and medicine, it also gave new impetus to long-standing debates within sociology of knowledge and epistemiology. But not only academia discovered self-care. It was a key issue of the most influential social movement of the seventies, the women's movement, although often expressed in a terminology very different from that in academic quarters. And it was debated heavily in the medical system based on the growing popular interest in self-help and wellness. When it first emerged therefore, self-care was both an academic and a political issue--and it was unavoidable that the two should not only influence each other, but at times clash.