Ch. 14- Health and Medicine Flashcards
Medicine
a field of science devoted to diagnosing and treating various bodily ailments as well as a social institution that provides opportunities for studying the ways in which cultural processes act as a form of social regulation or control over the body.
Health:
the normal functioning of an organism; depend on a given society’s definition of which functions are “normal,” reflecting the society’s concept of the good life.
Disease
a general lack of comfort; depend on a given society’s definition of which functions are “comfortable,” reflecting the society’s concept of the good life.
Medicalization of deviance
the process by which medicine has taken over some of the functions previously attributed to religion and the law in terms of defining what is normal and desirable versus what is deviant.
Sick role
a term associated with the functionalist Talcott Parsons to describe the patterns of behavior that a sick person adopts in order to minimize the disruptive impact of his or her illness on others; a role governed by social expectations.
Stigma
a label that changes the way an individual is viewed in society, typically in a negative way.
biomedical model
the viewpoint that illness can be explained on the basis of aberrant somatic processes and that psychological and social processes are largely independent of the disease process; the dominant model in medical practice until recently
physical reductionism
The process by which the medical model and medical professionals exclude social, psychological, and behavioral dimensions of illness in favor of concentrating solely on the individual’s body and bodily functions.
Alternative medicine
forms of treatment that fall outside of the conventional scientific medicine, including prayer, homeopathy, and acupuncture.
Civic community
A sense of solidarity within a society Robert Putnam, who coined the term, measured civic community on the basis of individuals’ involvement in public life. Like Durkheim’s concept of moral community. Putnam’s suggests that a relationship exists between social integration and the health and success of an individual.
Morbidity rates
the amount of illness in a given society during a particular time frame.
Mortality Rate
The number of deaths in a given society in a particular time frame.
Life expectancy
a measure that refers to the average number of years individuals are expected to live.
What is
a field of science devoted to diagnosing and treating various bodily ailments as well as a social institution that provides opportunities for studying the ways in which cultural processes act as a form of social regulation or control over the body.
Medicine
What is
the normal functioning of an organism; depend on a given society’s definition of which functions are “normal,” reflecting the society’s concept of the good life.
Health:
