The Sociology Of Health And Illness

Society has progressed both socially and technologically as has medicine. This includes our understanding of health and healing as evidenced by Dossey’s three eras of medicine. Era 1, beginning in the 1800’s, reflected the prevailing view that health and illness are totally physical in nature and therapies included surgical procedures and drugs. Era 2, starting in the 1950’s, related to the mind and body. Practitioners began to realize that emotions and feelings can impact health. Era 3, still developing today, began in the 1990’s and builds on the previous eras by adding the spirit and proposes that consciousness is not confined to one’s

Also sociologists believe that the focus on a particular patient for whom a cure should be found for is limited. As little concerned is paid to environmental and social factors that may lead to ill-health. The biomedical approach tends to focus more on the individual while ignoring the environmental factors that may cause disease.

Overtime the understanding of human society has been seen and described in many different perspectives. With new concepts and point of views backed by research and study, sociology continues to be changed and adjusted as we learn more about humanity every day. But the interesting thing is, that the way sociology changes, is similar to the way many things in life change over time as well. For example, in this paper we will look at the medicalization of society through its three main perspectives, and see that they work hand in hand. The medicalization of society is constantly changing due to ever-growing technology and discoveries. We continue to learn more and more each day about both sociology and medicalization which is why it is easy for us to put them both into the same perspective together. The medicalization of society can be explained through the three main sociological perspectives allowing us to better understand and analysis each concept for its own different meaning.

The focus and objective of sociology is to examine social patterns. Examining social patterns reveal the sources of pressures and constraints that affect individuals’ thoughts and behaviors. There are three types of social patterns which are culture, social institutions and social structure. Culture is the shared symbols, ideas, beliefs, values, customs and material products by people in a particular society. These shared factors are accumulated through the passage of time. Social Institutions are structures and or mechanisms that provide a set of ideas and or rules that governs how individuals are to act in order to achieve important goals to which that society recognizes. Social structure is the statuses and or pattern of social relationships that have an effect of shaping individuals’ interactions with one another and how various distributions are determined. Hierarchy is one type of social structure.

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).

In this essay, the terms social model and medical model will be explored. Then, aspects of sociological theory and how it influences the delivery of health and social care will be explored

As already discussed, sociology is the science of social behaviour. Biology, however, is 'the science of life ' (Bagley 2014). This refers to observable, physical components of the human body, such as cells, tissues, and organs. Biology is

Merit 2 – Use different sociological perspectives to discuss patterns and trends of health and illness in two different social groups.

In modern society there is a general consensus that ‘good health’ is something that everyone wants to experience and that each individual knows what this involves. Because there are so many different definitions of health and ill health it can become a very complicated concept. Walsh (2011) states that “In sociological terms ‘health’ and ‘illness’ are contested concepts. This means that the general meaning of these words should not be taken for granted.

The biopsychosocial model of health is a multidimensional approach to health (Lecture 1, 2014). It focuses not only on the biology or physiology of a person, but also includes the psychology of a person and the manner in which society and culture influence health as well (Gurung, 2014). It was developed in the 21st century as an important theoretical framework to approaching health and medicine (Richtig, Trapp, Kapfhamer, Jenull, Richtig & Trapp, 2016).This approach makes the assumption that the mind and body connection is not only relevant but also vital to a person’s entire well being. It takes a holistic approach when treating an individual and can improve health in the

This paper will explain the three known theoretical sociological perspectives in science today; it will explain in detail what they are about and what they stand for.

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.

It was developed by Mills in a time of great social upheaval – industrialisation, globalisation and capitalism meant that the social phenomena were different to those previously experienced. The meta-narrative of science and ‘scientism’, previously used to develop theories of society, began to be presenting more moral questions and

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.

To begin with, society and social factors have increasingly been investigated as they have been thought of