First reading was The Sociology of Health, Healing, and Illness by Gregory L. Weiss and Lynne E Lonnquist. The main focus of this was how sociology came about and what sociology is about and what it will be about in the future. Though sociology has changed and grown since it’s early days, sociologists still use the same concepts during their studies. Things like data-collection techniques and the scientific method haven’t changed since the early days of sociology.
“The study of health care as it is institutionalized in a society, and of health, or illness, and its relationship to social factors” is what Ruderman (1981:927) says medical sociology is. Sociologists study these things because they help us understand how society works. Sociologists want to understand how these things affect groups of people differently and why they do.
Rudolf Virchow is one of the first people recognized for medical sociology. Although he recognized biology as a necessary factor, he stated that sociology was needed to create social structure. He saw those poor people who lived in squalor, close living quarters, and couldn’t take preventative measures were a big factor in many contagious diseases. Social medicine is the efforts to improve public health.
Major changes in this field throughout the 1950s and 1960s had a major effect on how sociology was looked at. They saw how preventative measures and medicines could help protect people, as well as public health changes. During this time, being sick changed from infectious and contagious diseases to ones that were degenerative. I think this is very interesting because the health field changed a lot because of this. They stopped focusing on diseases that were contagious from the environment and started focusing on ones that are individual. This helped sociologists get hired into more environments that involved medicine. They also began to get funding which helped with surveys, training programs, and research.
In 1959, the ASA accepted medical sociology which in turn lead to people to find out about sociology and expand the members and community. “The ASA section on medical sociology currently has 1,000 members (there are about 13,000 ASA members) and is the third largest special interest section within the association. Medical sociologists have since been able to expand their work to cover more topics and have been able to find more information about previous topics.
Since becoming a more widespread science, medical sociology has been able to look at other things like ethical issues of medicine. These things consist of gene editing, cloning, and abortion. After bringing this into the public, movements have come out of the woodwork to voice their opinion like pro-life and pro-choice.
The sociological perspective is all about thinking of the big picture, which for us can prove difficult sometimes. Instead of thinking of everyone you know that is doing a certain thing, you focus on one person at a time and try to deduct their reasoning for why that one person does it instead of why they all do it. Sociology is about placing all of these people in a hypothetical box and trying to figure out what the common traits or environment is between them. By doing this, we’ve figured out that there are most often things that connect all of these people together. In the reading, it mentions that most people begin smoking as a teen. Instead of seeing adults that smoke, sociologists dig deeper and find things like this that explain what they are doing now.
One of the biggest orientations in sociology is functionalism. This looks as society as a system and things like families as parts of the system. Like a machine, these parts can go bad and affect the machine as a whole, or it can be beneficial to the machine. They think that these interdependent parts have an effect on society whether they be good or bad effects. I find this very interesting and sometimes difficult. It’s hard to forget the individuals and focus of the whole group of people.
While sociology has grown massively since its beginning, most of it comes from sociologists using their sociological perspective to bring about these advancements. “The most important tasks of medical sociology are to demonstrate and emphasize the important influence of cultural, social-structural, and institutional forces on health, healing, and illness, and to maintain a spirit of free and critical inquiry while recognizing the interdisciplinary basis of health and illness.” page 12.
The second reading which was Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Health Inequalities: Theory, Evidence, and Policy Implications by Jo C. Phelan, Bruce G. Link, and Parisa Tehranifar. The main topic of this reading was evaluating the theory mainly developed by Link and Phelan. The theory is that there are four dominating qualities in the cause of health inequalities we face. The argument in this essay was how inequalities always exist and new ones come about as the world and society changes.
Sociologists are debating how come people with a lower socioeconomic status have a higher probability of having worse health and don’t survive as long as people with a higher socioeconomic status. When sociology was first coming into the world, SES groups died because of infectious diseases. They were more likely to catch these diseases because they commonly lived in small quarters with many people and didn’t have quality hygiene. Now, infectious diseases aren’t nearly as common but people with a lower SES are still more likely to have bad health and die earlier than higher SES groups. Link and Phelan “reasoned that we cannot claim to understand why health inequalities exist if we cannot explain why they persist under conditions that should eliminate or reduce them, and if we can understand why they persist, this may provide clues to the more general problem of the causes of health inequalities.” Page 2.
They argued that flexible resources are a reason these inequalities keep recurring even when the situations have completely charged, whether with time or change in society. They explained flexible resources as “knowledge, money, power, prestige, and beneficial social connections can be used no matter what the risk and protective factors are in a given circumstance.” Page 2. I think this is really important because it’s not always about money to have an advantage. Knowing someone that works at Mayo Clinic would benefit the individual. Having a friend that is starting an experimental treatment would benefit the individual. I feel like people think just because you have money, you can get more treatment which is sometimes true but having beneficial social connections as they said could definitely help you out.
They found evidence that people with low SES have more risk factors and less protective factors. People who have lower incomes tend to be smokers more than people with higher SES. They also tend to be more overweight because healthy food costs more, and people with higher SES can afford gym memberships, personal trainers, nutritionists, and chefs. People with lower SES also live in cramped and unsanitary quarters and can suffer from unsanitary water, dehydration, and malnutrition.
Another thing I find interesting and has an impact is that people who have high-status occupations typically have health benefits and are less likely to have dangerous jobs. Working with chemicals, heavy equipment, and power tools are just a few examples of things that could be dangerous to workers. So, people with low SES are more likely to get hurt on the job and less likely to be able to get medical attention since the lack of health insurance. Also, if the person were to get injured, they would be less likely to be able to afford their bills than people with a high SES that are able to save leftover money from their paychecks and put into savings.
I have a very personal connection with the socioeconomic status affecting health insurance and unsafe working conditions. Currently, my dad is out of work because he had to get shoulder surgery from working in manual labor at a factory his entire life and can barely pay his bills. His doctor said he wouldn’t be able to go back to work for at least 12 weeks. His parents couldn’t send him to college and he couldn’t afford it on his own. My 24-year-old brother who attended a technical school is having to help our dad pay his bills. This is such a common occurrence in manual labor jobs for you to sustain an injury from your longevity of doing strenuous activities for decades. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s much that can be done about this. Paying them more would be unfair to people who obtained degrees for their career and giving them better health benefits would reduce their salary.
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