The self-help component of primary health care.
The target of "health for all by 2000," to be achieved through primary health care, is discussed. The author states that the goal entails reorganization of health care and community participation at the local level. Self-help groups are proposed as an effective and efficient vehicle for participation by the people in their own health care, and the strong points of such groups, including emotional and psychological support, and orientation toward action and progress, are described. Another major feature is that participants become their own health care personnel, achieving some expertise in the management of their particular illness or disability. Clubs for hypertensives, wherein participants learn to monitor and control their blood pressure, are used as an example of the self-help group. The author suggests that self-help could be a basic component of primary health care, and contribute to "health for all."
In this work we present a decision support system for the melanoma diagnosis using individual methods and the collaboration between these methods. The system designed uses a photograph of the lesion and it makes a preprocessing task to extract the region of interest. Then, several characteristics of the image are analyzed, studying with different methods the degree of malignity; the methods used are based in Bayesian rules and in neural networks. Finally, each individual decision from each method contributes in some way to the final decision. The classification rate obtained with the cooperative approach is above 92%.