Health and medicine

Test 3, set 4

What does a sociological lens say about physical disorders and disease?

• Health problems have a social basis — shaped by culture, norms, language, and discourse

• Disease is multi‑factor and complex, not just biological

• Eating disorders show this: linked to abuse, substance use, cultural pressures, and environment, not just the body

How does sociology define health and disease?

• Health = normal/right condition: basically the absence of illness

• Ill health = disadvantage: harms lifespan and fertility

• Longevity = goal: living longer is seen as the ideal

• Disease = deviant condition: leads to medicalization (doctors define, monitor, and treat it)

• Health = regular condition: being healthy is viewed as the expected state, not unusual

What do health as balance, functionality, and subjective health mean?

• Health as balance: feeling in balance with your environment and your body

• Health as functionality: being able to do normal tasks and live a satisfying life (“If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything”)

• Health as subjective: health is partly personal — people feel “balanced” in different ways and do different activities

What do wholistic definitions of health say?

• Complete well‑being: physical, mental, and social well‑being even if illness is present (WHO)

• Meaning matters: illness is experienced and interpreted, not just measured

• Personal + public: health has private feelings and public effects

• We rely on our bodies for interaction and activity

• My health affects others (contagion, care, support)

Has people living older age increased or decreased?

• Increased

What is Parsons’ sick role in functionalism?

• Illness has social + personal sides

• We are socialized to know the rights and responsibilities of being sick

• Sick role: behaviours that reduce disruption to society

  • Not responsible for the illness (needs verification)

  • Entitled to privileges: time off normal duties, proper attention

  • Obligated to try to get well quickly

Define Freidson’s 3 versions of sick role: Conditional, Unconditional Legitimate and Illegitimate

• Conditional – temporary conditions entitled to special privileges

• Unconditional Legitimate – incurable and long-term disease, but lacks special privileges over the long-term, subject to severity

• Illegitimate – stigmatized disease where the person is seen as responsible for the condition and is not entitled to privileges. E.g.,
  addiction

What do illness work, everyday work, and biographical work mean in the interactionist view of illness?

• Illness is a lived experience and becomes part of your life story, especially with chronic conditions

• Some illnesses are unpredictable, requiring new routines, skills, and coping

• Illness work: managing the condition (tech, meds, appointments)

• Everyday work: managing daily life + relationships (stigma, embarrassment, changed interactions)

• Biographical work: rebuilding your personal narrative (identity shifts, loss of independence, responsibility)

What does the biomedical model say about health?

• Product of modern industrial society — science + nation‑state shape health

• Health shifts from personal/spiritual → public, centralized, and objectively defined

• Involves surveillance and health promotion to manage population growth, productivity, prosperity, defense

• Builds systems: sanitation, water, burial, food handling

• Uses demography: life expectancy, birth/death rates, data indicators

• Since the 1990s: emphasis on personal responsibility — self‑monitoring, prevention, self‑care

What do medical gaze, medicalization, and hyper‑specialization mean in the biomedical model?

• Medical gaze: defining disease through objective inspection — isolate, diagnose, treat

• Medicalization: medicine expands into all areas of life, even mundane things (e.g., diet)

• Hyper‑specialization: experts gain authority to label behaviours/conditions as deviant

• Leads to more pharmaceuticals and treatment of everyday issues (“going off script”)

• Creates a mind/body split → slow response to mental health

What are the main critiques of biomedicine?

• Medical prestige: maybe we’re healthier mainly because of better food, sanitation, hygiene, not medicine

• Harmful effects: medicine can cause drug reactions, misdiagnosis, and accidents

• Medicalization: creates artificial demand for treatment — “physician‑made” disease

• Deskilling: people lose basic health knowledge and coping skills

• Patronizing patients: doctors act as gatekeepers of truth, treating patients as ignorant

• Marginalizes alternatives: dismisses non‑medical healing methods

What does health transition mean?

• By mid‑20th century, many infectious diseases were wiped out (cholera, polio)

• Death shifts to non‑infectious, chronic diseases (cancer, heart disease)

• Patients live longer with illness, so the gap between experts and patients shrinks

• People become active managers of their illness:

  • Patient →person: more informed, involved

  • Care→ prevention: focus on avoiding disease

  • Hospital → community → DIY care: more care done at home and in everyday life

Define Epidemic and Pandemic

• Epidemic – infection that spreads beyond a particular community

• Pandemic – a worldwide epidemic, affecting a larger number of people (COVID, Spanish flu)

What does the social class gradient show about health? Wilkinson’s and Pickett’s thesis?

• Class at birth strongly predicts life expectancy

• Differences come from:

  • Access to health care + mortality gaps

  • COVID impacts: Black + minority communities in the US had higher death rates

  • Concierge medicine: wealthy people get better, faster care

  • Working conditions: danger, stress, instability

  • Unhealthy behaviours: smoking, alcohol

  • Poor diet: nutritious food is expensive

  • Low response to health‑promotion messaging

• Wilkinson & Pickett (1996) — Wilkinson Thesis:

  • More egalitarian countries have better average health

  • Inequality harms health through lost cohesion, economic insecurity, and higher stress

Which gender commonly lives longer who suffers more?

• Women live longer

• Men have more serious complications

• Women seek more help but in some developed countries then are more depressed then men

Define impairment, disability and disibility studies

• Impairment – lacking part or all of a limb, or defective limb, organ,
  or mechanism of the body

• Disability – disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by social organization that fails to account for physical impairments, thereby excluding people from mainstream social life

• Disability studies and the debate between the experience of
  ’impairment’ and the stigma of ‘disability’
  - Rejecting ableist assumptions and increasing the inclusion of
  impairment, alongside health and illness

What do the individual model and social model of disability mean?

• Individual model: impairment = the problem; leads to personal tragedy view; ignores social barriers

• Social model: how social and cultural barriers faced by
  disabled people cause problems experienced by disabled people.

Was there a rise or fall in disabilities in Canada? What are some reasons?

• Rise

• Mental health problems

What does alternative medicine show about health consumerism?

• Health consumerism: people use alternative treatments + online resources

• Increases patient involvement, choice, and direction — partly a reaction to biomedicine

• About 80% of Canadians use complementary/alternative medicine at least once; rising since 1997; $9B/yr

• Usually used after orthodox medicine is exhausted or alongside it

• Includes programs, supplements, acupuncture, reflexology, hypnotherapy, etc.

What does health technology and the socialization of nature mean?

• Socialization of nature: the body becomes socially shaped, not just “natural,” especially in the Anthropocene

• This shift drives new tech:

  • Prosthetics and smart implants

  • Cosmetic surgery

  • Gene testing/therapies

  • IVF

• Raises key questions:

  • Will tech increase the gap between experts and patients

  • Will medicine move from treatment → enhancement