PERSPECTIVES ON HEALTH
Main issues:
- Definition of health
- Explaining social distribution of health
- Role of doctors and other carers
KEY TERMS
- Disease, pathological abnormality with objective biological cause.
- Illness, patients subjective response to real or imagined disease. Involves pain, discomfort or abnormality. So you HAVE a disease and FEEL ill.
- Health, Absence of sickness, or a sense of well-being.
THE BIOMEDICAL MODEL
Good health seen as normal, disease is the cause of ill health, attacks on the body from bacteria and viruses. The view is challenged by some experts eg. genes.
POSITIVIST APPROACHES
Share scientific approaches but focus on social rather than individual biological. Positivists use comparative methods to identify social and economic causes of disease. Health statistics are useful in seeing difference in
the health of different social groups. Both consenses and conflict theories may use positivist research methods.
INTERACTIONIST APPROACHES
Health statistics are a social construction, telling us more about the process of diagnosis. Studies of sickness, particularly mental illness, is about labels. Even death may be socially defined. Diagnosis depends on negotiations between doctors, patients and others. Conflict theories concentrate on the importance of power in these relationships.
FUNCIONALISTS
Parsons said doctors allow people to drop out from responsibility without challenging consensual norms.
MARXIST APPROACHES
- Disease caused by capitalism.
- Institutions defining and explaining health are part of the superstructure.
- Medicine is a form of social control.
- Improving health depends on medical advance rather than reducing poverty and inequality???
FEMINISTS
- Disease is the result from inequalities in patriarchal society.
- Women experience disadvantages in both providing and using health care.
FOUCAULT
He said it was a new way, associated with capitalism, of disciplining the body. It replaced torture and prison as a form of social control of the body and later the mind. Doctors are experts which allows them to control patients. This replaced the traditional views where the rich regarded doctors as servants and the poor relied on folk remedies.
POSTMODERN APPROACHES
Shares with Foucault and the interactionist approach a mistrust. Biomedical approach is seen as a meta-narrative which claims a monopoly of truth when it is no more than a story which serves the interests of doctors.
Extra Information
The debate between positivist and interactionist approaches is more or less the same set of arguments found in the sociology of suicide and crime.
Death is defined by doctors, who decide by physical signs and then decide whether to resuscitate or not.