In “Unnatural Causes” the reason social class inequality produces health consequences is because the lower class doesn’t get the nutrition that they need compared to the higher class. As the social classes go down on the pyramid the people’s health get worse. For example, the rates of heart disease, chronic disease, diabetes, and stroke get more survivor. Health is more than health care, individual behaviors, or genes because there are different factors that cause bad or good health. It’s based on wealth or poverty, social environment, and green space or toxins in their area. For example, the crime rate in their community, how much education, their house size, race, and what jobs they have, and the kinds foods they are able to afford. These
are all social determinants of health in today’s society. The U.S. typically think of health only in terms of health care and personal behaviors because it’s the most basic thing people think about. Health care is based on if you go to the doctor or not and personal behaviors because it’s the first thing people judge you off of. The people that benefit from in individualistic view are people in the higher class because they have more confidence to be more successful. The view is based on how you look at yourself and for the lower class they probably just looking at getting by each day. The social, economic conditions, and structures affect people’s health not by individual choices because they are born into it. Usually when your family is born into a class it’s hard to get out of it. For the lower class they have negative net wealth and not able to support their family. For higher class they are able to support their family and give them everything to make the successful. It’s harder to crawl out of poverty compare to being born with money.
I chose not to use any of the prompts provided, but instead connect the article to what I learned in my sociology class lass quarter. In class we watched part one of film series of Unnatural causes, titled Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making us Sick "In Sickness and in Wealth". While reading the article this reminded me about the cases studied in the film to see whether wealth inequality contributes to making people sick. In the film they focused on the social determinants of health, wealth and education. In both the article and part one of the film Unnatural Causes they focused on three different individuals and how their health are affected by they choices they make and the access they have to care.
Having a good income liberates some extra stress from people’s lives. In the film, the narrator compares people with different income status, the narrator interviews these two different families in order to observe how income can influence people’s health. According to the narrator, “In some areas, people die twice, and five, even ten years sooner than in others. Cancer and heart disease are almost twice the rate in some areas as in others.” (Page 2) Unnatural Cause-the narrator observes two districts in Louisiana; one area is populated of low income working class, and the other one the contrary. The narrator is interviewing Jim Taylor a sixty year old man who is CEO of a hospital. During the interview Taylor opinions about the benefits of living in a community of effluents. Such as, having less stress, being able to exercise without being afraid of being assaulted. In contrast, to a person who lives in working class community is harder to have a healthy lifestyle because of the lack of time, security and desires. Pertaining to desire, working class people have to work long hours in factory to earn at least 20,000.00 per year, so they end their days extremely tired. Furthermore, wealthy peoples can afford a better quality of nutrition. Thus, people with a low income prefer to buy foods according to the quantity instead of quality. In fact, social stress is the more common
Social determinants of health (SDOH) are increasingly becoming a major problem of Public Health around the World. The impact of resources and material deprivation among people and populations has resulted in an increase in mortality rate on a planetary scale. Social determinants of health are defined as the personal, social, economic and the environmental conditions which determines the health status of an individual or population (Gardner, 2013). Today’s society is characterized by inequalities in health, education, income and many other factors which as a result is becoming a burden for Public Health around the world. Research studies have shown that the conditions in which people live and work strongly influenced their health. Individuals with high levels of education and fall within the high income bracket turn to have stable jobs, live in the best neighborhood and have access to quality health care system than individuals who have low education and fall with the low income bracket. This paper is to explain different social determinants of health and how they play ...
Outlined within this essay are two sociological theories which have been investigated this will be in conjunction with a contemporary health issue. This then will be related to how the individual’s lifestyle and social class to give the reader a better understanding of this health issue.
People in lower classes are more likely to get sicker more often and to die quicker. People in metro Louisville reveal 5- and 10-year gaps in life expectancy between the city’s rich, middle- and working-class neighborhoods. Those who live in the working class neighborhood face more stressors like unpaid bills, jobs that pay little to nothing, unsafe living conditions, and the fewest resources available to help them, all of these contribute to the health issues.
Germov (2015: 87-93) states that the most common explanations of health inequality can be grouped into five main categories. These five categories are artifact explanations, natural/social selection explanation, cultural/behavioral explanation, materialist/structural explanations, and psycho-social/social capital explanation of the social gradient of health. Basically, health inequality has to do with what your status is as an individual, cultural, economic, as well as education level. In the textbook, Germov (2015: 516) defines the term social gradient of health “as a continuum of health inequality in most countries from high to low.” Meaning the poorest group has the worst health status, while each group above the poorest has a better health status. An example of this injustice would be the indigenous
THESIS: Race differences in identity and social position were, and are, more important than class differences in American society.
"What has happened in America is that achievement is so important that everyone wants everyone else to know what they have done. . . And in case you don't know, they want to tell you with a lethal combination of houses, cars and diamonds. (Fabrikant 2005))" Inequality in the United States is changing, and for the worse. People who are not wealthy are now competing to have the "status" of wealthy, which causes the wealthy to literally get wealthier while the middle class and upper middle class are going increasingly in debt trying to keep up with the wealthy.
Social class is more than a word, more than a label, it is a description of the norms and values of a social group in society. It is powerful description, a description so powerful that many people live their lives around it. With all groups, there are stigmas that surround it. A stigma is a negative social label that not only changes others’ behavior toward a person but also alters that person’s own self-concept and social identity. In order to show that social class is not just an economic label of groups but a social construction, Robert Granfield uses the idea of stigma to discuss the experience of working-class students in prestigious universities of law. He does so in his article ‘Making it by Faking it’.
Nordqvist, Christian stated some facts about health, “ health can be defined as a physical, mental, and social well being, and a resource for living a full life. It refers not only to the absence of disease, but the ability to recover and bounce back from illness. Factors for good health include genetics, the environment, relationship, and education.”(page2). Health can be defined in many factors, but they all relate to a person's status and where their class in the economy. If one is wealthy, he or she can have access to healthcare that provides treatment to any of their health issues. But for the people who have low income, they can not afford health insurance and have a higher risk of becoming ill because they don’t have the resources to live a full healthy life. Most of those individuals have mental health issues because they often stress about living and surviving everyday with so little income. Christian Nordiqvist also said, “According to the WHO, the higher a person's socioeconomic status (SES), the more likely they are to enjoy good health, a good education, a well-paid job, afford good healthcare when their health is threatened” (pg.2). Christian is correct because the wealthier a person is, the higher chance of being in good health because he or she has the privilege of good health
Socio-economic class or socio-economic status (SES) may refer to mixture of various factors such as poverty, occupation and environment. It is a way of measuring the standard and quality of life of individuals and families in society using social and economic factors that affect health and wellbeing ( Giddens and Sutton, 2013). Cockerham (2007 p75) argues: ‘Social class or socioeconomic status (SES) is the strongest predictor of health, disease causation and longevity in medical sociology.’ Research in the 1990s, (Drever and Whitehead, 1997) found out that people in higher SES are generally healthier, and live longer than those in lower SES.
I grew up in India, where access to food healthcare was very rare. However, my family and I were very fortunate to have many Doctors in our family. This was the only reason why I was able to get good doctors for monthly checkups, and vaccinations as a kid. There were also shortage of pharmacies, however I personally never had to experience any hardship. That does not mean others had the same. Many people were not as fortunate as I was. People who were poor or lower caste had no proper medications or healthcare. They did not have regular health checkups or proper funds to have three meals a day. Poor people are always the target of many unfortunate situations. “You wont see inequality on a medical chart or a coroner's report under 'cause of death.' You wont see it listed among the top killers in the United States each year. All too often, however, it is social inequality that lurks behind a more immediate cause of death, be it heart disease or diabetes,
This essay will discuss, illustrate and evaluate the following statement: inequalities in health are increasing in the 21st century. The focus will be on one of the key determinants of health inequality, social class, specifically in the UK.
Since the black report of 1988, it has been clearly identified and approved that people from the lowest social group experience the poorest health in society. The better social class you have the better health services you will get; this is because if you have a higher social class it means that you have the money to get medicines and see the best health professionals so therefore it means that they are more likely to recover rapidly but for the people with a very low social class when they are ill they would struggle to get the money to buy medicines for their recovery.
Economic status definitely effects health in many ways. Most people in poverty don't exactly live in the best areas. Actually, many of them reside in some of the worst places imaginable. Imagine being so afraid to walk out of your front door because you could get robbed of your last ten dollars or shot by a gang of drug dealers. This is a nightmare that many poor people have to call life. Violence is only a small part of the stress that people in poverty deal with. They also have to live in crowded public apartments, also known as ghettos. These people live day to day facing the cold reality that they will probably never move up in the social ladder or even out of the dreadful ghetto. Another problem is the location of the public housing. Since the public apartments are government funded they are located on the cheapest real estate available. The cheapest real estate is usually near a major interstate or an industrial area with many factories. The pollution produced by the roadways and factories saturates the communities in poverty, in return creating many breathing problems for the residents. Numerous physical health problems are produced from low socioeconomic status.