Chapter 7: Health, illness and medicine

Health inequalities
1. Patterns of health (vary according to social group)
  1. Ethnicity
  2. Social Class
  3. Gender
  4. Geographical location
  5. Explanations for variations
    1. Artefact/statistical
    2. Cultural
    3. Structural
Mental Illness
1. Social Realism
  1. causes of mental illness located in living experiences of oppressed groups:
    1. Ethnic minorities
    2. Women
    3. Poor
2. Social constructionism
  1. Foucault - shift to rational thinking
  2. Labelling Theory
The Medical professions
1. To whose benefit do they operate?
  1. Men - the feminist approach
  2. Themselves - Weberian approach
  3. The ruling class - Marxist approach
  4. For the increasing dispersal of power - Foucault
  5. Society as a whole - the functionalist approach
Health service inequalities
1. Services delivered unequally to different groups
  1. Social class
  2. Age
  3. Gender
  4. Ethnicity
    1. Reasons for inequalities
      1. Supply reasons
        Differences in funding
        Priority given in prestige services
        Inefficiency of local NHS
        Ability to pay for private healthcare
      2. Demand reasons
        Lack of knowledge of the system
        Cultural barriers
        Ignorance of warning signs of ill health
Physical Illness
1. What is meant by 'normal' bodies and 'normal' functionality?
  1. Disability as abnormal - stigma model
  2. Disability as different - impairment model
  3. Normal bodies as social construction as well as physical entities
2. Illness and health socially constructed
  1. Traditional Models
    1. Based on mind/body explanations
    2. Linked to complementary medicine
  2. Lay definitions
    1. Based on common sense
    2. Vary by culture, age, gender, etc

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Chapter 7: Health, illness and medicine

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