Exam 3 Topics

Question 1

Explain the social construction of technology.

Answer 1

the process through which groups decide which potential technologies should be pursued and which should be adopted

Question 2

Why did health care shift away from hospitals to nursing homes, home care, and hospice care?

Answer 2

the change in financing caused the shift away from hospitals. the DRG system and Medicare usually only pay hospitals preset amounts for inpatient surgery. insurers are increasingly reducing their costs by raising reimbursements for outpatient care and lowering it for inpatient care. hospitals shifting to acute ill persons instead.

Question 3

Explain the technological imperative.

Answer 3

the belief that technology is almost always good, so it is mostly always appropriate to use all existing technological interventions regardless of their cost –> pseudoscience

Question 4

Explain struggles for nurses gaining a professional status.

Answer 4

• changing gender roles
• continuation of the doctor-nurse game
• corporatization and the changing health care system
• structural changes effected professionalism with RN’s

Question 5

Explain the rise of nursing.

Answer 5

• Nigthingale –> hierarchical structure
• emphasis on care and duty
• separate spheres

Question 6

How is osteopathy a parallel profession?

Answer 6

it performs the same roles as allopathic doctors while retaining professional autonomy and at last remnants of a fundamentally different ideology about illness causation

Question 7

What are curanderos?

Answer 7

• traditional folk healers within Mexican and Mexican-American communities
• combine western and folk theories of illness
• holistic treatments
• no legal status

Question 8

Explain the difference between allopaths and homeopaths.

Answer 8

• allopaths: cure by opposites
• homeopaths: cure by similars

Question 9

Explain heroic medicine.

Answer 9

type of treatment in which allopathic doctors would cure an illness by purging the body

Question 10

What factors helped doctors gain power in American society?

Answer 10

• AMA
• growing belief in science by the public
• doctors viewed as scientific
• doctors gain more social status than competitors

Question 11

Explain the Flexner Report.

Answer 11

a report on the status of American medical education; identified serious deficiencies in medical education and helped to produce substantial improvements; there were cons to it though

Question 12

What are the three A’s associated with describing a profession?

Answer 12

• Autonomy (setting educational and licensing standards)
• Authority
• Altruism (public confidence in practitioners’ ethics)

Question 13

Explain professional dominance.

Answer 13

• freedom from control by other occupations and groups
• ability to control other occupations in the same economic sphere

Question 14

What is the Nuremberg Code?

Answer 14

a set of principles regarding the ethics of human experimentation

Question 15

During the 1960s, hospital committees..

A) typically decided who would receive kidney dialysis based in part on social criteria.

B) were abolished by most hospitals

C) typically decided who would receive kidney dialysis based solely on age

D) typically decided who would receive kidney dialysis based solely on medical criteria

Answer 15

A

Question 16

Hospital ethics committees

A) have essentially replaced the use of individual ethics consultants

B) prior to the legalization of abortion typically decided who should receive abortions on scientific rather than social grounds

C) offered legal protection to doctors who performed abortions before it was legalized

D) now exist at about 10 percent of U.S. hospitals

Answer 16

C.

Question 17

Which of the following belong to an occupation that is both limited and marginal?

A) curanderos

B) pharmacists

C) nurses

D) direct-entry midwives

Answer 17

D.

Question 18

The growth of clinical pharmacy has garnered support from

A) hospitals’ use of pharmacists to deliver patient medications

B) hospitals’ fears of legal liability from medication errors

C) doctors’ fondness for relationships with pharmacists

D) all of the above

Answer 18

B.

Question 19

Sociologists consider nurses semi-professionals, rather than professionals, because

A) the ethic of caring has kept nurses from pushing for professional status

B) nurses have considerable autonomy, status, and training, but remain subordinate to doctors

C) most nurses have not attended college

D) nursing lacks a code of ethics

Answer 19

B

Question 20

What is another term for “regular doctors”?

Answer 20

allopaths

Question 21

Compared to conditions in 1900, by the late 1920s

A. considerably more medical schools existed

B. women and blacks found it easier to obtain medical training

C. immigrants and poor whites found it easier to obtain medical training

D. the quality of medical training had improved considerably

Answer 21

D.

Question 22

Homeopathic doctors treated illness with

A) inoculations

B) “heroic” measures

C) extremely dilute solutions of drugs

D) extremely powerful drugs

Answer 22

C.

Question 23

What were factors that led doctors to lose power in America?

Answer 23

• coporatization
• practice protocols by admin
• DRGs and RBRVS; government control
• decline in public support
• decline in AMA
• countervailing powers challenging medical dominance

Question 24

Discuss the history of hospitals and how have they changed?

Answer 24

• they were not necessary intitially and most received care at home from family members or caregivers
• others were sent to almshouses
• focus shifted to outpatient than inpatient care (acute > chronic)
• would go back in time and get rid of the class-system

Question 25

What is the hospital-patient experience like now?

Answer 25

• shorter lengths of stay
• health care workers interact more with the technical machines, not patients
• reductions in gov. funding

Question 26

Explain the life in nursing homes.

Answer 26

• commodification of residents
• documenting v. providing care
• worst in for-profit homes
• nursing assistants are mostly non-white, immigrants, or occupy low socioeconomic status

Question 27

Explain the life in hospice.

Answer 27

• palliative care of the dying
• disproportionate number of cancer patients
• cost shift from insurers to families

Question 28

Explain the life of home care.

Answer 28

• physical, financial, and psychological toll on the caregiver at home
• home health aides
• most are women who care for the other and they are mostly minorities

Question 29

What are the major medical norms?

Answer 29

• emotional detachment
• clinical experience valued more than scientific research
• mastering uncertainty
• mechanistic model of the body and disease
• intervention valued more than natural processes
• emphasis on acute and rare illness over chronic illness
• paternalism as a consequence

Question 30

Who was the stupid guy that performed the vesico-vaginal fistuale surgical procedure?

Answer 30

Dr. J. Marion Sims

Question 31

What are some principles of the Nuremberg Code?

Answer 31

• voluntary consest
• avoid unnecessary suffering
• minimize risks
• results justify research

Question 32

What are stem cells?

Answer 32

• grown in lab harvested adult stem cells or fetal blood
• harvested from embryos created in labs with cloning or fertilizing the egg with a sperm

Question 33

Why should sociologists concern themselves with bioethical issues? Why should bioethicists study sociology

Answer 33

• bioethicists should not only view individual cases but also the much broader social and political issues associated with them
• sociologists should observe world and their research as ethical and as political and intellectual enterprise