BSS - What is health / Biomedicine as a culture Flashcards
What is psychology? How is it relevant to medicine?
- Scientific study of mind and how it dictates and influences our behaviour.
-Understanding the links between physical and psychological health , effective health promotion/intervention
What is sociology? How is it relevant to medicine?
-The scientific study of society
-To understand the patient in front of us, we need to understand their society, personal trouble and social issues
What are the 5 parts of the biomedical model of health?
> Disease is the result of deviations in measurable variables
1. Mind/body dualism
Mind and body are discrete and can be treated separately
2. Mechanical metaphor
The body can be repaired like a machine
3. Technological
use of medical technology including pharmaceuticals in a clinical environment, ignoring cultural impact
4. Reductionist
Diseases arise from a single biological breakdown within the individual
5. Specific aetiology/causation
Diseases have specific causes which can be located
What are some limitations of the biomedical approach?
1.Model does not account for today’s major health threats
-In the past acute, infective diseases; now chronic diseases (e.g. heart disease, cancer, arthritis and stroke)
2.Body is isolated from the person - treats the disease rather than the ‘whole person’:
-Does not acknowledge bio/social factors
3.Gives doctors a lot of power and patients very little > objectified
-Does not take into account that clinical phenomena are reported in the patient’s words
What is meant by the biopsychosocial model of health?
-Patient centred approach
What does it mean by medical knowledge is socially constructed?
-What qualifies as biological disease or biomedical evidence is often socially negotiated and interpreted
What is the intersectionality perspective?
- Social identities can overlap, creating compounding experiences of discrimination. E.g. Race and Gender are not separate
> Cross systems approach to structure health and illness.
What is the world health organisation definition of health?
-State of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
-Incorporates the positive and negative definitions of health…. Goal? Impossible to achieve?
What is disease, sickness and illness?
-Disease: Pathological changes within the body, Observed through the signs or symptoms
Illness:
-Sickness: The social role of those defined as diseased or ill
What do we mean by anthropology and biomedicine?
-The importance of context
>Acknowledge alternative realities, what is real/not depends on the context e.g. blood cells/spirit debate
How is biomedicine an ethnomedicine?
- ethnic inclusive medicine >ethnomedicine of western culture
- Ethnomedical systems develop within a specific cultural, environmental and historical context and reflect the core cultural themes of their society in particular religious and philosophical beliefs.
What are the 3 parts to ethnomedicine?
- Explain causation of disease
- Diagnose disease
- Treatment
What is the criteria for good science? What science demonstrates this?
- Objectivism: Observer separate from the observed
- Reductionism: All complex ideas can be explained by simple ideas
- Positivism: Derived from physically measurable data
- Determinism: Establish law/rule
>Biomedicine
DROP
Define medicalisation.
-When processes that weren’t considered medical problems become redefined as medical problems
What does it mean by the power of biomedicine?
- Medical doctors have the power to choose what is defined as illness
- Doctor’s can objectify a patient’s body so it becomes an independent entity from the person and so becomes an object as knowledge
- Once a patient enters a clinic they become objects and is seen as dehumanising
