Health and Illness Flashcards
(15 cards)
What is health?
A state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being
What is the biomedical approach to health?
Describes health and disease in individuals
Focus on biological mechanisms and health behaviors that result in those patterns
What is the sociological approach to health?
Describe patterns in health across a population
Focus on the social forces that underlie those patterns
What is the individualistic perspectives on health and illness?
Medicine focuses on “proximate causes” of illness. From this perspective, “diseases arise from biological defects or imbalances in the body”
There are downstream clinical, behavioral, and biological aspects of health and disease
What is the structural perspective on health and illness?
Sociology focuses on structural causes of illness
These are upstream social forces that drive social health patterns
What are the social roots of sickness?
Health and illness are spatially patterned
Who is Emile Durkheim?
Studied suicide across and within European countries
The belief that suicide is about personal defects of the person
How health and illness are spatially
Who is W.E.B. Du Bois?
Studied the living conditions of black Philadelphia
People’s health is related to their surroundings
How health and illness are spatially
Infant mortality in Washington, D.C.
The infant mortality rate by ward in Washington, D.C., shows that the death rate among infants is not the same in all areas of the city
Resources are also spatially patterned
In addition to the spatial patterning of maternity departments, healthy food and public transportation are unevenly distributed in Washington, D.C.
What is structural violence?
“[T]he deadliest and most thoroughgoing kind of violence is woven into the fabric of American society. It exists when some groups have more access to goods, resources, and opportunities than other groups, including health and life itself. This violence delivers specific blows against particular bodies in particular neighborhoods. […]. This kind of violence is called structural violence because it is embedded in the very laws, policies, and rules that govern day-to-day life.” (p. 7-8).
What are social determinants of health?
Geography
Race, ethnicity, structural racism
Gender, structural sexism
Socioeconomic status/class
Social networks
Neighborhoods
Stigma
Stress
How is racism a social determinant of health?
Race is not a cause of health disparities.
Racism is.
This embodiment of racism and poverty accounts for some of the patterns of health and disease we see” (64).
“[S]tudies have found that people who experienced high degrees of personal discrimination had worse health outcomes across a series of diseases. For example, women who had experienced high levels of perceived racism over their lifetimes were five times more likely to deliver a low-birthweight baby than those who did not. This suggests that the experience of inequality causes disease” (
How do we define the boundaries of health and illness?
Definitions and experiences of health and illness are socially constructed
What is medicalization?
The description of an aspect of cultural or social life in medical or biological terms
How the medical profession define health and illness?
The medical profession labels set so symptoms as diseases.
These labels can reflect what is and isn’t socially acceptable in any given place and time.
DSM- APA had homosexuality as a medical disorder
Medicalized labels are not applied equally to all social groups.
