Health as a Social Construct: Illness and Disease

Question 1

What is meant by Marinker’s Three Levels:
Disease
Illness
Sickness (sick role)

Answer 1

Disease is biological
Illness is how a person negotiates disease
Sickness - how society deals with disease and/or illness

Question 2

What is meant by the social construction of health?

Answer 2

Disease categories are not created independently from social or moral forces
This does not mean that medicine is unscientific BUT that medicine and science are social processes

Question 3

What is ego-dystonic homosexuality?

Answer 3

having a sexual orientation or an attraction that is at odds with one’s idealized self-image, causing anxiety and a desire to change one’s orientation or become more comfortable with one’s sexual orientation.

Question 4

What is the WHO definition of health?

Answer 4

A complete state of physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity

Question 5

What is the biochemical model of Illness?

Answer 5

Germ theory - That each disease has a single and specific cause
Health and illness are qualitatively difference. No continuum between the two

Question 6

What is the epidemiological triangle? Apply the example of the treatment of heart diseases to this model

Answer 6

Host - exercise more
Agent - reduce fatty food intake
Environment - more opportunities for exercise, healthy food

Question 7

What do the causal models of disease entail?

Answer 7

Disease can be prevented by modifying factors that influence exposure and susceptibility
Less useful if single causal agent remains unidentified e.g. arthritis

Question 8

What is the socio-environmental approach?

Answer 8

One framework for classifying determinants of health

• personal health practices
• individual capacity and coping skills
• social and economic environment
• the physical environment
• health services

Question 9

What is medicalisation?

Answer 9

invoking of medical science to describe, explain or explore events of daily life

Question 10

Medicalisation occurs on three levels:
Interactional level
Conceptual level
Institutional level

Answer 10

1. patient actively asking dock to give them a sick role
2. behaviour labels e.g. ADHD
3. institutions treat people as disease or conditions

Question 11

What is iatrogenesis?

What are the 4 types?

Answer 11

being made sick through medical practice
Medical incompetence
Cascade iatrogenesis - polypharmacy, side effects
Social iatrogenesis - difficult to readjust to society after institutionalisation
Structural iatrogenesis - forced into sick role e.g. eating disorders and force feeding

Question 12

What is disease mongering? Give examples

Answer 12

Wideining the diagnostic boundaries of illness and aggresively promoting their public awareness in order to expand their markets for treatment
e.g. erectile dysfunction, female dysfunction, restless leg syndroe, bowel flora

Question 13

What are the 5 theories of disease?

Answer 13

historically medicine as 'chaotically diverse'
germ theory
multi-causal models of disease
general susceptibility
socio-evironmental approach