Chapter 7: Health, illness and medicine

Chapter 7: Health, illness and medicine

1. Health inequalities

   • Patterns of health (vary according to social group)
     • Ethnicity
     • Social Class
     • Gender
     • Geographical location
     • Explanations for variations
       • Artefact/statistical
       • Cultural
       • Structural

2. Mental Illness

   • Social Realism
     • causes of mental illness located in living experiences of oppressed groups:
       • Ethnic minorities
       • Women
       • Poor
   • Social constructionism
     • Foucault - shift to rational thinking
     • Labelling Theory

3. The Medical professions

   • To whose benefit do they operate?
     • Men - the feminist approach
     • Themselves - Weberian approach
     • The ruling class - Marxist approach
     • For the increasing dispersal of power - Foucault
     • Society as a whole - the functionalist approach

4. Health service inequalities

   • Services delivered unequally to different groups
     • Social class
     • Age
     • Gender
     • Ethnicity
       • Reasons for inequalities
         • Supply reasons
           • Differences in funding
           • Priority given in prestige services
           • Inefficiency of local NHS
           • Ability to pay for private healthcare
         • Demand reasons
           • Lack of knowledge of the system
           • Cultural barriers
           • Ignorance of warning signs of ill health

5. Physical Illness

   • What is meant by 'normal' bodies and 'normal' functionality?
     • Disability as abnormal - stigma model
     • Disability as different - impairment model
     • Normal bodies as social construction as well as physical entities
   • Illness and health socially constructed
     • Traditional Models
       • Based on mind/body explanations
       • Linked to complementary medicine
     • Lay definitions
       • Based on common sense
       • Vary by culture, age, gender, etc