The functionalist approach
Talcott Persons seed that for society to function efficiently, its members have to be healthy. He describes illness as a form of device and ill people as performing a form of social role “the sick role”.
This are the rights associated with the sick role:
• To be exempt from normal social obligations (school, college or work & from meeting normal family obligations)
• To be cared for
Parsons will only care for the people that are sick in the family.
The responsibilities of the sick role included the individual:
• Taking all reasonable steps to get better and seeking to resume their normal place in society as soon as possible
• Co-operating with medical professionals, particularly doctors and their staff
The overall view is that illness has social consequences.
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They see a doctor has agents that work interests of the employers instead of the patients. Apparently they think that the doctors role is to make sure that people go back to work as soon as possible basically provide the company owner with healthy workers.
The interactionist or social action approach
This is the approach that has the most attention to issues of health and illness. The concerns are:
• The processes that lead a person to define themselves as ill- people vary ill people accept that they are ill and also vary whether they will seek professional help. There are some people with serious illness that does not consider themselves as ill.
• The interaction between the professional and the patient in agreeing how ill they are. After they understand and illness interactionalists are interested in the negotiation that takes place with the professional on trying to agree on the impact of the illness in the patinas life.
• The impacts on a person’s self-image and on their relationships caused by the illness when they are labelled as ill.
The feminist
D1: I have decided to look at a 6 year old going through bereavement. Bereavement means to lose an individual very close to you. When children go through bereavement they are most likely to feel sad and upset about the person’s death. Children at a young age may not understand when a family member dies. Children may not understand bereavement. For example a 6 year old’s father been in a car crash and has died from that incident. Death is unpredictable and children can’t be prepared for a death of a family member as no one knows when someone is going to die or not. Unfortunately every child can experience bereavement even when a pet dies. It is important that we are aware that effects on the child so we can support them in the aftermath.
2.3 Explain how the health and social care practitioner own values, beliefs and experiences can influence delivery of care.
During 1951 Parson was the first to debate about the sick role. According to Parson, there are the few expectations which need to be met before considering individual sick. Firstly, individual should not cause their own health problem an example could be by eating a high-fat food which leads to overweight and linked to type 2 diabetes. An individual receives a less sympathy. Secondly, individual who is sick must adamant to get well otherwise will see as faking the illness. Thirdly, an individual illness should be confirmed by a physician so they can follow the instruction. The relationship between the physician and the patient is hierarchical where the instruction is provided by the physician and followed by the
The sickness is not something that affects the human body but it is the poverty, violence, unaffordable healthcare, housing crises, food scarcity, and health stigma that has become normal in society. By placing a high value on health and healthcare, the patriarchal society we live in has been able to set a value on people. Thus those which are considered inferior to begin with, such as racial minorities, women or queer people, have a bigger disadvantage. The persons worth is then measured in the ability to sell labor, mediated by identity, and defines our access to the basic needs of life, those who are sick are seen as expendable in exchange of the interest of those who are "well". Hedva states, "To stay alive, capitalism cannot be responsible for our care… its logic of exploitation requires that some of us die” (2015).
In order to understand medical terminology it is essential to know the meaning behind certain words that are used to describe sickness and how those terms have different connotations in each culture. Understanding the semantics of medical terminology can not only help the clinician treat the patient, but it sheds light on the different components that each word represents within a global perspective. Some words that have been interpreted and adjusted to fit social constructions include disease, illness, health, and sickness.
Health as a Social Construction In my essay, I aim to find out why social construction affects the health of our society. Ill health may be defined as 'a bodily or mental state that is deemed undesirable'. This means that health is the condition of the body both physically and mentally. Social construction of health refers to the way health varies from one society to another.
“Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity,” from Kaiser Permanente, is a good quote to tell us the important of mental, physical, and social well-being for our health. If a person doesn’t have all of three conditions, he/she doesn’t have a healthy body and healthy life. Tuyen, my aunt’s brother in law, is an example. He needed to work twelve hours per day without day off and health care to take care of his family. Therefore, he often feel tired, stressed and depressed about his job over twenty years. One day of five years ago, Tuyen got a terrible sick and became mental retardation after that. So, he looked like a baby boy and couldn’t make money for the family
The uncertain nature of chronic illness takes many forms, but all are long-term and cannot be cured. The nature of chronic illness raises hesitation. It can disturb anyone, irrespective of demographics or traditions. It fluctuates lives and generates various inquiries for the patient. Chronic illness few clear features involve: long-lasting; can be managed but not cured; impacts quality of life; and contribute to stress. Chronic illnesses can be enigmatic. They often take considerable time to identify, they are imperceptible and often carry a stigma because there is little sympathetic or social support. Many patients receive inconsistent diagnoses at first and treatments deviate on an individual level. Nevertheless, some circumstances require
This also requires the person to be socially and economically productive in order to be seen as healthy. According to Mildred Blaxter (1990), there are different ways of defining health. Furthermore, disease can be seen as the presence of an abnormality in part of the body or where there is a harmful physical change in the body such as broken bones. So, illness is the physical state of disease, that is to say, the symptoms that a person feels because of the disease. However, there is some limitation of these definitions which is not merely an absence of disease but a state of physical, mental, spiritual and social wellbeing.
Society has developed throughout the years, three main sociological perspectives concerning what exactly makes up a society including culture, structure, and power. These three are titled Functionalist Perspective, Conflict Perspective, and Symbolic Interactionalist Perspective; all of which attempt to define society.
Employers? GPs? ‘Health Psychology’ (Odgen 2012) states that more responsibility is placed on the individual for their illness, due to the combination of factors such as behaviour, beliefs, and social factors. Consequently more responsibility for treating the illness is place on the person, instead treating them as a passive victim. Unfortunately the perspective of paramedics means they are less empowered to receive support, with 80% of ambulance personnel believing their organisation does not encourage them to talk about mental health (Mind 2015).
A Functionalist perspective: This perspective regards illness as socially deviant behaviour which requires social control. Being defined as ill legitimises exemption from the responsibilities of daily life. The condition, however, is that the patient seeks help and cooperates with the doctor. The ill person has a requirement to attempt to be healed, and the doctor is obligated to help the
She was quiet, didn’t say anything. I asked her again and she said “going through surgery” “medications”. ANALYSIS According to Mol, “We know that the body is an object of medical knowledge”. Referring back to our class reading assignment and relating to my interviewer illness, doctors cannot change her habits for her illness till they don’t understand her way of understanding her own illness.
Body & Society Talcott Parsons, the Sick Role and Chronic Illness, Matthias Zick Varul, Body & Society 2010 16: 72
The objective of this essay is to explain the definitions of health and critically evaluate ways in which the medical profession exercise social control with reference to the ‘sick role’, the doctor / patient relationship and how the medical profession contribute to ill health. For our society to have an understanding of health and illness and how to improve the development, we must first define health and what it means to be healthy. Health has been defined in different ways over the years. We have the negative definition, which is the ‘absence of disease’.