sociology ch.2

• Well-being


  Health, normal function
• Epidemiology


  Chronic illness, Stress, Symbolic interactionism, Anomic suicide, Modernization
• As we have illustrated, what makes medical sociology important is the critical role social factors play in influencing the health of individuals or social groups
• Health is not simply a matter of biology but involves a number of factors that are cultural, political, economic, etc.
• The phenomenon and understanding of health also change along with the structural transformation of society from traditional to modern society
• Health as normality


  The definition of normality?
• Health


  • Absence of illness
  • The ability to function
  • Well-being
• The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being
• Not merely absence of diseases and injuries
• Thomas McKeown (1979) supports the WHO definition
• Feelings of well-being are more than the perceived absence of disease and disability
• Many influences—social, religious, economic, personal , and medical contribute to such feelings
• Role of medicine


  Not to create happiness but to remove one of the major sources of unhappiness from people's live, i.e. disease and disability
• Health


  The ability to function
• Different definitions on health imply different roles of medicine on peoples' live
• It affects the dynamic and cooperation between medicine and other kinds of knowledge
• Primitive model


  • In primitive society, people already recognized a cause-and-effect relationship between doing certain things and a symptoms of a disease
  • But they did not understand much about the functioning of the body, magic became an important component of belief and health care
• Primitive people


  • Thought that illness was caused by evil spirits
  • They use animals, plants, stones, etc. to expel harmful spirt from a diseased body
• According the M. Foucault, in the late 18th century, modern medicine replaced the metaphysical notion of sickness by a positivistic (實證) understanding
• The human body became an object of study and observation in order that physiological processes could be demystified and brought under medical control
• Medicine of the species


  The human body became a subject of regulation
• Medicine of social spaces


  Government involvement in regulating the conduct of daily life. Setting up social norms and expectations on behavior
• Clinics were established to both treat patients and train doctors
• There were also systematic implementation of public health measures
• Lots of physicians and scholars found that the decline in deaths from infectious diseases in the second half of the nineteenth century was mainly due to improvements in diet, housing, public sanitation, and personal hygiene instead of medical innovations
• Germ theory of disease


  Scientific research decisively confirmed the germ theory of disease and uncovered the cause of a host of diseases, along with the vaccines providing immunity
• Alexander Fleming


  Discovered penicillin—the first antibiotic
• Medicine's thinking

  Dominated by the search for drugs as "magic bullets" that could be shot into the body to kill or control all health disorders
• By the late 1960s, polio and smallpox were largely eradicated and infectious diseases had been severely curtailed in most regions of the world
• This situation induced a major change in the pattern of diseases, with chronic illness replacing infectious diseases as the major threats to health
• It is characterized by the emergence of chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and stroke as the leading causes of death
• This transition to chronic disease meant that physicians were increasingly called upon to deal with the health problems of the "whole person"
• By that time, it is not only radical thinkers but many of the most respected figures in medicine were insistent that treating the body as a mechanical model would not produce true health
• The need to understand the impact of lifestyles and social conditions on health has become increasingly important
• This situation has promoted a closer association between medicine and the social sciences of sociology, anthropology and psychology
• The first epidemiological transition occurred 10,000 years ago when human societies shifted form hunting and gathering to agriculture
• Emergence of novel infectious and nutritional diseases
• The second transition began about 200 years ago as improved nutrition and living standards, public health measure led to a decline in infectious diseases and a rise in chronic and degenerative diseases
• We are now entering a third epidemiological transition
• There is a resurgence of infectious diseases previously thought to be under control