Week 10:Professionalization and Medicalization Flashcards
(27 cards)
Socialization
- Process through which individuals are inducted into their culture. It involves the acquisition of attitudes and values, of skills and behavior pattern making up social roles established in the social structure
- Social conditioning processes whereby an individual internalizes the knowledge, skills, values, and behaviors deemed appropriate by socializing agents
Culture of Medicine
stages of training are designed to expose student to certain experiences and conditioned them
Formal Socialization
-Lectures labs, small group sessions
-Formal teachings reflect the current focus of the culture of medicine
-How are they assessed/ grading this curriculum
-How instructors talk about content
-Cases discussed
-How many credits are given to certain courses
-ASSESSMENT DRIVES LEARNING
Testing Effect
information that students are tested on is better learned than information that is not tested on
Recommendations for Formal Socialization
-Increase the number of formal graded patient scenario exercises
-More formally graded vignettes
-Evaluate students on
-History taking
-Physical examination
-Patient communication
-Interpersonal connectivity
The Knowledge Gap and Talcott Parsons
-There is a communication gap between Doctors and patients
-The knowledge gap is a potent ingredients in Dr-Pt relationship
-Doctor has authority
-Patient should be submissive
The Hidden Curriculum
-The dominance of the doctor is taught in hidden curriculum
-Outdated norms, values and regulations are being taught during training
-Scientific information in med culture is seen as absolutely true
-The doctors are the knowers
-Medical knowledge = ration science and clinical reasoning
-This defines health and illness
-Physicians in training learn a set of values that undermine idealism and goals of professional education
-Impression management
-Shapes they way
they present themselves
Responsibility to learn
case presentation
when med students say oral out loud what the patients condition is as well as other things such as history and all hospital
Features of Case Presentation
- Depersonalization
- Passive voice
- Technology
- Account markers
Consequences of Case Presentation
- Mitigation of responsibility
- socialization/professionalization
The hidden curriculum core
Good patients
Educated and comply easily to medical services
Problem patients
Disrupt work routines, hypochondriacs
Fail to improve: Chronic
Have low social worth ‘Gomers”
Medicalization
Transforming or conceptualizing SOCIAL FACTOR INTO A DISEASE OR MEDICAL CONDITION
2 categories that are medicalized
- Deviant behaviors
-ADHD
-Alcoholism
-Mental illness - Natural processes
-Pregnancy
-Menopause
-Assumptions
Medicalization Assumptions
- Patient is now treated instead of punished
- The causes is located
Trajectory of Medicalization
- Based in prestige, dominance of profession
- Institute of social control
- Private medicalized market
Processes of Medicalization as an Institution of Social Control 4 Steps
- Expansion of what comes under medical domain
It expands it a persons life
E.g → diet, intercourse, circumcision - Control of surgery and drug prescription
Goes beyond organic disease
Cosmetic surgery - Access to bodily processes → natural and deviant
Inner workings of body and mind - Rhetoric
Conflated with good practice of life and infiltrated casual discourse
*There is a focus on individual illness and not the overall social problem *
Consequences of Medicalization
-Ignores the social causes of disease
Focus on individuals
-Disease is the individuals problems
-Focus on patients rather than social actor
-Mechanism of social control → enforcer of social norms
-Medical values are social values
Advantages of Medicalization
-Optimism belief person can be helped
-Can remove blame from the person or family
-Medical control can be more flexible or cost effective
-Medical treatment have been helpful
Disadvantages of Medicalization
-Decreasing power of the sick person
Possibility of increasing power of experts
-Does calling something an illness really remove blame?
no , fetal alcohol syndrome
Overdiagnosis and overtreatment
De-medicalization
Not being a diseases/ illness anymore
Examples
Homosecuality
Masturbation
Childbirth
Stuttering
Self-injury
Childbirth
Stuttering
Self injury
Medicalizing to de-medicalize
Re-medicalization
Becoming medical again
Implications of medicalization
-Social construct are seen as healthy and normal
-Things are no longer recognized as social
-No longer recognize the inherent social inequalities developed
Revisiting the Rationing of Medical Degrees in the United States
-Jenkins and Reddy
key takeaways:
- There is a shortage of US medical students and doctor
-Degree rationing → by under producing doctors they remain in high demand which increases their value compared to non us medical doctors
-This allows US students to have more prestigious residencies
-The gap exist so that USMDs take residencies positions in last “attractive” areas
-Professions control prestige by creating boundaries as to what profession can do what
The Making of a Disease: Female Sexual Dysfunction
-Ray Moynihan
key takeaways:
-In order to treat women with drugs, there must be a clear diagnosis as to what needs to be treated
-Researchers with close ties to drug companies are defining and classifying a new medical disorder at company sponsored meetings
-The corporate sponsored definitions of female sexual dysfunction are being criticized as misleading and potentially dangerous
-Commonly cited prevalence estimates, which indicated that 43% of women have female sexual dysfunction are described as exaggerated and are being questioned by leading researchers
-Controversy surrounds current attempts to medicalize sexual problems and establish normative data for a range of physiological measurements of female sexual response
-The role of drug companies in the constructions of new conditions, disorders, and diseases needs more public scrutiny
