Heath and wellness

Health and Wellness 

Disease: Physical or mental disorder in he structure or function of the body  

Impairment: Loss or diminishment of physical or mental function  

Disability: A limitation created when an impairment isn’t accommodated in the physical and social environment  

Demography: Study of features of human populations such as births, deaths, aging, etc...  

Racial segregation; Degree to which different racial and ethnic groups live apart  

Economic segregation: Degree to which the poor live apart from wealthier groups  

Medical sociology: Branch of sociology that deals with social and cultural features of health, illness, and medicine 

Social control: Ways societies try to influence members’ behaviour to maintain social order  

Labelling: Assigning a disease or medical condition to an illness or set of symptoms  

Contested illness: Illness that is disputed or questioned by medical experts  

Psychosomatic illness: Illness that is considered the physical manifestation of a mental illness or stress  

Medicalization: Process by which ordinary experiences are defines in medical terms, or by which circumstances previously regulated by religion or the law come to be defines in medical terms  

Sick role: Rights and responsibilities of a person who has a socially legitimate illness  

Socially legitimate: consistent with the norms and values in a society  

Stigma: Characteristic of an individual or group that is seen as inferior or undesirable  

Sexually transmitted infection: An infection which can be passed between individuals during sexual contact  

Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act: Federal law requiring hospital emergency departments to stabilize or transfer people with medical emergencies or in labour, regardless of their health insurance status or ability to pay  

Health care system: Collection of institutions and organizations that deliver and fund health care  

Medicare: Federal program that provides health insurance to adult 65 years and older and people under 65 who have certain conditions  

Affordable Care Act: Federal health care law that expanded health insurance coverage  

Universal coverage: All people have affordable access to the medical services they need  

Ideologies: Systems of ideals  

Structural racism: Set of beliefs and ideologies, and the social structure that they create through policies and institutions, based on the idea that a specific racial group is biologically or culturally superior to other racial groups  

Structural sexism: Set of beliefs and ideologies, and the social structure that they create through policies and institutions, based on the idea that men are superior to women  

Occupational prestige: Statis and social power associated with particular occupations  

Social network: Structure of socially interrelated individuals  

Social support: Emotional, information, and instrumental (money, transportation, etc...) support we receive from others  

Social environment: Social elements of one’s work, school, or neighbourhood, including violence, civic participations, and cohesion  

Physical environment: Human made/built (housing, roads, pollution) and natural (rivers, climate) features of a work, school, or neighbourhood context 

Stereotype: A widely shared perception about the characteristics or abilities of members of a particular group  

Spillover Effects: Effects of one context or situation on a seemingly unrelated context or situation  

Interpersonal discrimination: Unfair treatment by one person to another, generally due to a prejudice about that person or their social group 

Stress proliferation: One stressful experience cascade into other stressful experiences 

Vigilance: Anticipation and worry-related stress due to the burden of stigmatizing stereotypes about a social group  

Life course perspective: The view that social experiences and health are interrelated throughout our lives  

Pandemic: An outbreak of an infectious disease over a wide geographical area for a significant amount of time  

Epidemic: Outbreaks of infectious disease in a single country or other relatively contained part of the world  

Epidemiology: The study of how diseases spread and affect populations  

Social genomics: Field that integrates social factors with genetics to understand health. Sociologists identify social forces that results in social patterns of health  

Socioecological model: the health of a person is embedded within many contextual layers– which are interconnected. 

Improving schools: student-centred learning environment, positive ties between families and educators, professional capacity, ambitious instruction, and a strong leader.