Perspectives

• Functionalist perspective 


  Parsons described sickness as dysfunctional for society.

  Four components

  • the sick person is granted a temporary exemption from their normal social duties.
  • the sick person is not considered to be responsible for their condition but rather is given sympathy.
  • it is the sick person’s responsibility to try to get well; failure to do so results in the sick role no longer being considered legitimate
  • it is the sick person’s responsibility to seek competent technical help and cooperate with the physician’s directions.
• Interactionist


   focus on the experience and meanings of health or illness
• Conflict perspective


  analyze topics such as the role of inequality in patterns of health and illness and problems with the healthcare system. It also critiques the healthcare system itself, such as the state’s power to legitimize some forms of healthcare and the power of the corporate elite in the healthcare system
• Feminist perspective 


  at the micro level, feminist scholars analyze the “moral boundary work” that women with chronic pain engage in when trying to manage their interactions in the healthcare system.

  at a more macro level, some feminist analyses of health and illness have focused attention on the processes by which certain characteristics and conditions come to be perceived as indicative of health or illness in the first place
• Medicalization


  refers to the ways that certain characteristics or conditions are “defined in medical language, understood through the adoption of a medical framework, or ‘treated’ with medical intervention”
• Postmodern perspective


  approaches also address the medicalization of society, in terms of the relationship between knowledge and power.