Identifiable Sick Role

A philosopher named Ivan Illich was one of the first people to use the term medicalization; he believed the medical profession was harmful and termed it as iatrogenesis, which is where the illness or social problems are caused from the medical professionals themselves (Medanth [1]). He believed that this occurred on three levels. The first level is Clinical, which is described as the side effects being worse than the original condition. Social, the second level, is where people were reliant on their doctors to help cope

In the sociology of medicine Parson (1951) regarded medicine as functional in social terms. By tackling the person’s problems in medical terms the tendency towards deviance that was represented by ill health could be safely directed, until they could return to their normal self. (Lawrence 1994: p 64-65: BMJ 2004: Parson cited in Gabe, Bury & Elston 2006, p 127).

This report will be investigating the various sociological perspectives on health as well as the models and definitions of health and ill health. These topics will assist in the understanding of how different people and different cultures react to ill health.

- When you think of a doctor, what comes to mind? Someone who does everything in their power to save lives might be one of the thoughts. But what if the patients’ of these doctors death is incurable, and no medical involvement can change that fact, than what becomes the role of a doctor?

The book “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” is an interesting book that explores the distinctions in the perception of human conditions. An explanatory model of illness provides an opportunity to understand how people view their medical conditions (“Explanatory Illness,” n.d.). The explanatory model of illness provides a vantage point for healthcare professionals to understand an individual’s perception of his/her illness (“Explanatory Illness,” n.d.). The model seeks to explore the complex relationship between the physiological condition of an individual and the individual’s social and cultural background.

The sick role is the actions and attitudes that society expects from someone who is ill. Furthermore, the roles entails the actions as well as, attitudes that a person might expect from other members of society. Indeed, being ill is a form of deviance as it violates the norms of health and productivity. A vital part of the sick role is you are exempted from your regular responsibilities, however, you are now responsible for seeking medical care and to recuperate. For my artifact, I chose a pamphlet from the Student Health Center of USD. Specifically, the pamphlet addresses how to care for your cold and includes the sections: Method of Spreading, Symptoms, When to Seek Help, Self- Help Tips and Treating your URI Symptoms. The treating your symptoms

Illich (1990) even went as to say that themedical proffesion (including pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment suppliers) have a vested interest in illness so they create illnesses which have to be treated by doctors and drugs etc. this means conditions that used to be seen as natural, such as dying or unhappiness have now undergone a social iatrogenesis (doctor caused illness) whereby people cannot handle their own health anymore. postmodernists dislike this use of medical discourse because one theory has more prestige that it should be considered the truth.

They partition up the body and put on a show to treat the parts in disconnection. By difference, all encompassing healers, or vitalists, consider the whole body as a gathering of interrelated, related frameworks. No single part exists or can be dealt with in detachment. The entire thing is more noteworthy than the total of its parts. Sicknesses are seen as general conditions that have limited, after a moderate, slow process, maybe years of disregard. Vitalists look to empower the body's characteristic life powers by sound judgment implies, immaculate air, unadulterated water, unadulterated nourishment, working sensory system, clean blood. The dependable variable for getting influenza is not the vicinity or nonappearance of infection, but instead the quality or shortcoming of the singular's insusceptible resistance. We need to concentrate on the territory, not the germ. An excess of characteristic cures have been smothered and covered in the course of recent years to amuse the figment that the objective of prescription is

Social Factors and Health Andrew Russell „ The social basis of medicine” 1. Summarize the most important statements of chapter 1 „„ The social basis of medicine”.

The conceptualisation of medicine as an institution of societal control was first theorised by Parsons (1951), and from this stemmed the notion of the deviant termed illness in which the “sick role” was a legitimised condition. The societal reaction and perspective was deemed a pillar of the emerging social construction of disease and conception of the formalised medical model of disease. Concerns surrounding medicalisation fundamentally stem from the fusion of social and medical concerns wherein the lines between the two are gradually blurred and the the social consequences of the proliferation of disease diagnosis that results from such ambiguities of the social medical model.

The biomedical perspective is used to explain various medical conditions. This can include, but is not limited to using an individual’s body and pathogens to explain poor health. On a different note, the sociological perspective takes on a different approach to explain medical conditions. The sociological perspective focuses on the external influences, rather than then internal influences, such as the social environment, institutions, and relationships to assess and explain illness. The sociological perspective contains the following theories to support its assessment of illness and they are: stigma, labeling theory, and medicalization. These three concepts play a large role in the sociological perspective. According to Freund, stigma is a discrediting label that changes the way an individual is viewed by their society (Freund). Stigma can prevent an individual from being able to connect and relate with the society that they live in because society has placed a judgmental label onto them because of their health condition. Similar to stigma, labeling theory employs the use of labels, but labeling theory observes the behavior of an individual once labeled and why that individual received that label (Freund). Freund also defines medicalization as an act by the medical field that has the power and authority to set the norms of what constitutes as an illness (Freund).

The role of the physician in the treatment of illness involves arriving at a diagnosis and providing treatments to the patients that will enable him or her to return to a normal state of health. Cockerham (2003:167) maintains that the assessment of illness by health professionals involves “defining what good, desirable as opposed to what is bad, undesirable, and abnormal” Moreover, Cockerham (2003:167) further maintains that the assessment is interpreted within the context of existing medical knowledge and the physicians experience, meaning that the physician revisits his medical knowledge of various symptoms to see which ones matches the patients’ symptoms so that he can prescribe appropriate medication. Disease in sociology is defined as “an adverse physical state, consisting of a physiological dysfunction within the individual; an illness is defined as a subjective state pertaining to an individual’s psychological awareness of having a disease and usually causing that person to modify his or her behaviour” (Cockerham,

Townsend and Davidson (1988) also suggested that the term health is derived from the word “whole”, which is a recipient of the healing process. Therefore, an attempt to heal or cure in medical field literally means, to make whole or restore health. It is this idea that influences medicine to adopt a mechanistic approach towards disease management thereby obscuring the understanding of health in human context of well-being, which advocates for alternative or complementary approaches. This viewpoint also reflects in some definitions and the medical model discussed above. The criticisms of the medical by Illich (1974) is that the medical view only deals with the cause of disease or illness rather than the external factors affecting the person’s health. Within different sections of medicine, for example the mental health department, there are marked differences when explaining the origin of illness, disease and treatments.

Imagine you are injured or sick and have sought a doctor’s help. Although you trusted your doctor, something, something seemingly very in control of the doctor, went wrong. You are angry and confused, but also think of the commonality of medical malpractice. So, why do doctors, who are supposed to help, harm? Though many flaws influence it, malpractice can be, and often is unintentional. Most doctors aren’t trained to harm their patients. Inexperience and lack of medical discovery led to unintentional suffering of the patient. Personal flaws, like lack of willingness to abandon previous medical methods and shortcomings in communication also harm patients. Further reasons why doctors harm are socio-medical understandings that breed hate, prejudices stemming from a society’s belief about certain people, such as the medical practice under the Nazi regime. Additionally, displayed in the case of Ignác Semmelweis, judgement of one to oneself can be detrimental to any progress one’s ideas could make. We will examine these concepts through Jerome Groopman’s “Flesh-and-Blood Decision Making”, Sherwin Nuland’s The Doctors’ Plague and Barbara Bachrach’s “In the Name of Public Health”. Those who practice medicine are, unfortunately, unfree from the imperfections that plague all of humanity. Through these intimate and varied faults, doctors do harm.

The treatment of physical and mental problems has undergone a rapid change in the past few decades. An increasing number of bodily and behavioural symptoms now have a recognised medical diagnosis and corresponding treatment. Sociologists have attributed these changes to the process of medicalization, wherein “non-medical problems come to be defined and treated as if they were medical issues” (McLennan, McManus & Spoonley 2009: 271). Medicalization is an ongoing, gradual process which occurs through the social construction of new diseases by groups such as health professionals (Conrad 2007: 4). It can be argued that medicalization is an active and passive process by which diseases are constructed in an attempt to find treatments for patients; and that diseases can be ‘socially’ constructed as well as ‘corporately’ constructed by companies to create a profitable market of consumers. At the micro level of society, medicalization in the Western world has been influenced by liberal notions of individualization which has extended to some parts of the health sector. At the macro level, medicalization has been buoyed by the process of the professionalization, expansion of state monopoly over the health profession and religious and political social movements. Although some academics argue that the medicalization of society is less significant than the process of “de-medicalization”, there is clear evidence that the process of medicalization is intensifying and outstripping the rate