Health, Illness and

Disabilities

Instructor : Miss Amina Rizwan

Sociology of the body

• The rapid growth of eating disorders is astonishing, and brings

home clearly the influence of social factors on our health and
capacity for social interaction. The field known as the
sociology of the body.
The sociology of health and illness

• Anorexia actually reflects certain kinds of social change,

including the impact of globalization.

• The example of anorexia and other eating disorders is located as

a product of modernity, and a stark visual comparison is drawn
between the anorectic starvation among plenty of a young
Western woman and the starvation among famine within global
plenty of a young African woman. This comparison shows that
there are clear commonalities between scholars of health and
those working on the sociology of the body.
The rise of the biomedical model of health

• The rise to dominance of the biomedical model of health is

described, with its focus on bodies and disease entities rather
than people in the round.
• The biomedical model developed medical practice as a tool for
the rationalization and surveillance of the population.
• The dominance of the biomedical model is linked with the
transformation to modernity and the triumph of science and
rationalization.
Assumptions of biomedical model

• The main assumptions of the model are:

• the germ theory of disease;
• the separation of mind and body, rendering the patient as a
sick body;
• that treatment lies in the hands of trained specialists capable of
viewing the patient through the medical gaze and not with lay
practitioners.
Criticisms of the biomedical mode

• Criticisms discussed include:

• the real causes of improved mortality and morbidity rates are
environmental not medical;
• the patient as a person is negated by becoming a sick body;
unscientific may not necessarily mean ‘bad’, and non-scientific
approaches may have a contribution to make to health;
• the medical profession has spread its influence through the
medicalization of normal experiences such as pregnancy,
sadness and tiredness – this is further discussed through the
example of the use of Ritalin to control hyperactivity in
Criticisms of the biomedical mode

• the medical profession has spread its influence through the

medicalization of normal experiences such as pregnancy, sadness and
tiredness – this is further discussed through the example of the use of
Ritalin to control hyperactivity in children;
• the model has been open to gross political manipulation particularly in
the area of ‘population policies’ the most extreme of which is
eugenics.
• The rapid development of genetic medicine brings these issues to the
forefront in contemporary life.
•
Criticisms of the biomedical mode

• It has also been suggested that biomedicine cannot cope with chronic
and stress conditions.
• Hierarchical medical organization has created long waiting lists and
complex referral procedures;
• concern over the harmful effects of medication and invasive surgery;
• the asymmetrical power relationship between patient and doctor;
• and, a religious or philosophical rejection of being treated as a body
rather than holistically.
Public Health

• The emergence of nation-states brings the idea of a population to be

managed as an economic and military resource.
• Foucault has been influential in viewing modern medicine as part of a
process of regulating and disciplining both individual bodies and the social
body.
• The idea of ‘public health’ took shape as a way of eradicating pathologies
from the social body.
• A whole range of institutions including hospitals, asylums prisons, schools
and workhouses, developed as a means of regulating and controlling the
population.
•
Alternative medicine and Complementary medicine

• In many industrialized societies over the last decade, there has

been a surge of interest in the potential of alternative medicine .
• The expansion of both alternative medicine and complementary
medicine is located as a manifestation of the processes of
modernization which have promoted the notion of the individual
in control as an informed consumer and the conditions which
create but cannot cure the illnesses of modernity: insomnia,
anxiety, stress and depression.
•
Medicine and health in a changing world

• In the West everyone is on a diet in so far as we constantly make

choices about what to eat against a background of globalized
food production, medical advice and social pressures to look
young and be attractive.
• The example of diet is a useful one, as nearly all students will be
willing to express an opinion and have stories to tell of weight
reduction, ‘allergies’, medical or politically motivated diets.

•
HIV and AIDS in global perspective

•The emergence of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s is included as a counter to the

general trend away from acute towards chronic conditions.
• The rapid transmission of HIV and enormous death toll of AIDS – some
25 million deaths worldwide – demonstrates that the modern assumption
that most fatal diseases had been brought under control does not allow for
the creation of new ones.
•The AIDS pandemic has certainly shaken people’s confidence in modern
medical science to prevent disease.
•Health inequalities are also thrown into sharp relief by the distribution of
HIV/AIDS cases, with developing countries suffering the most severe
consequences.