Introduction-to-sociology-of-health-and-disease-15022024-111406am.pptx

sociology of health and disease

1. Introduction to sociology of health and disease Dr. Namrah Hammad (MPH, BDS) Lecturer Bahria University

2. Sociology of Health: an introduction Over the last decade the promotion of health has become a central feature of health policy at local, national and international levels, forming part of global health initiatives such as those endorsed by the World Health Organization. At the same time a concern with ‘healthy living’ has become a preoccupation for many people.

3. The Sociology of Health Promotion responds by offering the first critical sociological account of these developments and locates them within a set of wider socio-cultural changes associated with late modernism.

4. The Sociology of Health offers analyses of contemporary public health policy, lifestyle, consumption, risk and health. It also examines socio-political critiques of health promotion and reflects upon their implications for policy and practice, the impact of both morbidity on social life and social life on morbidity.

5. Diseases and conditions once attributed mainly to genetic predispositions are increasingly being looked at under a more global microscope with factors such as family, education, religion and economic standing all playing key roles in understanding the issue at hand.

6. The history of HIV/Aids illustrates a prime example of how sociological factors affect health. The disease is thought to have originated in Sub-Saharan Africa, where 69% of the world’s HIV/Aids cases currently exist, making heritage an important component to consider. However, there are even more sociological circumstances that contribute to the plethora of HIV/Aids victims in this area of the world. Female genital mutilation, an unfortunate cultural norm in parts of Africa, is conducive to the exchange of blood during sexual intercourse. Additionally, interference by religious activists often prevents any hope for promoting safe-sex campaigns.

7. Health is a state of complete well-being: physical, mental, and emotional This definition emphasizes the importance of being more than disease free, and recognizes that a healthy body depends upon a healthy environment and a stable mind. Medicine is the social institution that diagnoses, treats, and prevents disease . To accomplish these tasks, medicine depends upon most other sciences—including life and earth sciences, chemistry, physics, and engineering. Preventive medicine is a more recent approach to medicine, which emphasizes health habits that prevent disease, including eating a healthier diet, getting adequate exercise .

8. The sociology of health and illness The sociology of health and illness studies the interaction between society and health. In particular, sociologists examine how social life impacts morbidity and mortality rates and how morbidity and mortality rates impact society. This discipline also looks at health and illness in relation to social institutions such as the family, work, school, and religion as well as the causes of disease and illness, reasons for seeking particular types of care, and patient compliance and noncompliance. Health, or lack of health, was once merely attributed to biological or natural conditions

9. Sociologists have demonstrated that the spread of diseases is heavily influenced by the socioeconomic status of individuals, ethnic traditions or beliefs, and other cultural factors . Where medical research might gather statistics on a disease, a sociological perspective of an illness would provide insight on what external factors caused the demographics that contracted the disease to become ill.

10. The sociology of health and illness requires a global approach of analysis because the influence of societal factors varies throughout the world. Diseases are examined and compared based on the traditional medicine, economics, religion, and culture that are specific to each region.

11. Bio-chemical model versus Holistic approach Health and illness are, surely, simply biological descriptions of the state of our bodies. When we’re ill, we’re ill. A more refined version of this common-sense view underlies the long-standing biomedical model of disease. Disease is an organic condition: non-organic factors associated with the human mind are considered unimportant or are ignored altogether in the search for biological causes of pathological symptoms.

12. Disease is a temporary organic state that can be eradicated – cured – by medical intervention. Disease is experienced by a sick individual, who then becomes the object of treatment. Disease is treated after the symptoms appear – the application of medicine is a reactive healing process. Disease is treated in a medical environment – a surgery or a hospital – away from the site where the symptoms first appeared. This model has dominated medical practice because it has been seen to work. It is based on a technically powerful science that has made a massive contribution to key areas of health (for example, vaccination).

13. A Holistic Approach Symptoms that, according to the biomedical model, should force us to go to the doctor or take a pill are not necessarily seen as signs of illness by people themselves. Among a household of smokers, for example, the morning ‘smoker’s cough’ is unlikely to be seen as abnormal or a sign of ill-health: indeed, it is often calmed by a good pull on the first cigarette of the day. Among many Westerners, a suntan suggests health and good looks rather than leading to wrinkled skin or skin cancer. Among the Madi of Uganda, illness is often associated with failure to deal properly with interpersonal relations, so that social or moral – rather than biomedical – repair is needed (Allen, 1992).

14. Thus an alternative or complementary remedy for ill-health often takes a holistic approach to understanding the cause of illness and its remedy. Sociologists, anthropologists and historians have described the social basis of health and illness in a wide range of studies, including ethnographies of specific communities. They have explored issues of health care, performance of ‘the sick role’, the construction of mental illness as a disease, the wider creation of medical belief systems and the relationship between these and the exercise of power and social control. The sociology of health and illness is concerned with the social origins of and influences on disease, rather than with exploring its organic manifestation in individual bodies.