Social Models Of Health Vs. Old Biomedical Model

Social models of health have become more relevant and continue to do so when compared to the old biomedical model for health over the last 150 years. World Health Organisation (WHO) (2014) depicts as the health problems in this age have shifted towards cardiovascular diseases, cancers, obesity from infectious diseases in the early 1900s such as pneumonia and tuberculosis models only focusing on the biological solutions have become less important than the social determinants of these diseases.

A biomedical model is a set of modelling systems which typically and solely looks at the physical processes including pathology, biochemistry and the physiology of a diseases body or biology behind diseases such as identifying the bacteria, pathogens

The New England Journal of Medicine shows Graphical statistics of the leading causes of death in the U.S in 1900s with acute infectious diseases such as Influenza and tuberculosis being the most fatal and the emergent diseases to deal with. Due to following the biomedical model, effective medicine and vaccines are produced over the course of time, these diseases have been reduced from an epidemic to a rare occurrence in the 2000s only resulting in developing countries and rarely in western countries and developed places. The old biomedical model was useful at that time of stage because the model primarily deals with the biochemistry of the disease and thus researchers and scientists were able to produce and decrease the rate of the mortality through these diseases significantly over time. However in the 21st century the graph also depicts the leading causes of death in the U.S. in 2010 with heart diseases and cancer, with 192.9 and 185.9 deaths/100,000 respectively, being at the top of the leader board. This explain the importance of the social model over biomedical model in this era. As stated by William C. Cockerham, this is because of the fact that many of diseases are incurable such as cancers and many of these diseases are very expensive in terms of treatment with no guaranteed cure. Cockerham also depicts that aiming to solve and tackle chronic conditions and diseases with the same mind set for infectious diseases and trying to only develop drugs to eradicate them has proven little success in terms of actually improving the patients’ health. In comparison, the social models for health have proven quite useful in trying to eliminate and nullify some of these health problems such as obesity, AIDS and heart diseases. These includes educating people about the risks involved and how people can develop these