Health & Illness Flashcards
Focuses on describing and preventing disease and illness
public health
People who study the frequency, patterns, and causes of health and illness
Epidemiologists
Having a disease
Morbidity
Another word for death
Mortality
A measure of deaths during a child’s first year
Infant mortality rate
Differences in health that are due to unequal social patterns
Health inequities
The subjective experience of a disease, condition, or set of symptoms
Illness
Illnesses and disabilities related to pregnancy or childbirth, and, in particular, the treatment of Black women during pregnancy, labor, and the postpartum period.
Maternal morbidity
Health behaviors of pregnant women during the perinatal period (the time immediately before and after birth)
Pre-existing conditions
Social circumstances – the interconnected sequence and timing of socially-defined life events that unfold over a person’s life through their own actions and behaviors
Life course
A state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease
Health
The field of public health focused specifically on the health of mothers, infants, children, and adolescents
Maternal and child health
A disorder
Disease
A loss of function
Impairment
Limitations created when an impairment isn’t accommodated in the physical and social environment
Disabilities
The study of patterns in human populations, such as births, deaths, aging, and migration
Demography
Studied suicide rates in France and several other European countries and showed that different countries, and even different areas within France, exhibited vastly different suicide rates. He argued against the dominant understanding that suicide was caused by mental illness or personal shortcomings. Instead, he suggested that social factors outside the individual affect suicide rates.
Émile Durkheim
Published The Philadelphia Negro, a study of Black Americans in Philadelphia that included a detailed discussion of health. In 1906, he expanded this study in The Health and Physique of the Negro American. He argued that the poor health of Black Americans compared to White Americans wasn’t due to any individual biological limitations among African Americans but rather to social conditions
W.E.B. Du Bois
Families of different racial or ethnic groups and different SES live in different neighborhoods of unequal quality
Racially and economically segregated
A society’s efforts to influence behavior and maintain social order
Social control
Argued that labeling is a form of power exerted by the medical profession that can impact the illness experience
Eliot Freidson
The process of assigning a disease or medical condition to a set of symptoms
Labeling
Illnesses that are disputed or questioned by medical experts
Contested illnesses
Illnesses caused by mental factors such as stress or anxiety
Psychosomatic
Argued about the definition of medicalization
Irving Zola
The description of an aspect of cultural or social life in medical or biological terms
Medicalization
A set of rights and responsibilities granted to some ill people
Sick role
Described the sick role
Talcott Parsons
Ways that conforms to social norms and values (ex; the illness cannot be the person’s own fault)
Socially legitimate
Argued that illness is often explicitly seen as a reflection of personal shortcomings or moral weaknesses.
Susan Sontag
States that women in active labor cannot be denied care regardless of their ability to pay if they are at a hospital that takes federal insurance such as Medicaid. Many hospitals do not comply with this law
Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA)
Include the organizations that deliver care (e.g. health care providers, hospitals) and fund that care (such as governmental programs and private insurers)
Health care systems
The patient pays all health care costs personally; there is no health insurance. This model isn’t used by wealthy countries
Out-of-pocket model
The government pays all health care costs and funds it through taxes. Health care providers, including hospitals and doctors, can be employed by the government or have their own private practice. It is named after economist William Beveridge, who designed Great Britain’s National Health service
Beveridge model
Everyone is required to have health insurance, which is funded jointly by employers and employees and isn’t intended to make a profit. While health insurance operates through employers, the government provides oversight of costs. Health care providers are generally private. It is name after Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who designed the German welfare state
Bismarck model
Combines the Beveridge and Bismarck models. The government provides insurance funded through taxes or premiums, but supplemental private insurance may be needed. Health care providers are generally private
National Health Insurance model
All parts of the health care system are controlled by the government. This model was developed in the Soviet Union and is still used, in some form, by countries in eastern Europe
Semashko model
Covers certain health care costs for Americans aged 65 and older
Medicare
Covers certain health care costs for low-income Americans
Medicaid
(PPACA; commonly known as ACA or Obamacare) was signed into law. The goal was to make health care more affordable and accessible for more Americans, particularly those who couldn’t easily cover the costs themselves
Affordable Care Act
Health care coverage for everyone
Universal coverage
A broad category of factors, including “a society’s past and present economic, political, and legal systems [and] its material and technological resources…”, that drive social patterns in health.
Social determinants of health
According to this model, a person is embedded within their social networks and relationships, which are then embedded within their neighborhoods and communities, which are embedded within larger socio-political contexts
Socio-ecological model
Result in health inequities due to the unequal distribution of resources such as adequate housing or food and also through stigma and stress
Fundamental causes of health
A set of beliefs and ideologies and the social structure that they create based on the idea that a specific racial group is biologically or culturally superior to other groups
Structural racism
A set of beliefs and ideologies, and the social structure that they create through policies and institutions, based on the idea that men are superior to women; it is distinct from, and perhaps more important for health than, sex discrimination by individuals
Structural sexism
Showed that college-educated adults had lower mortality than adults with less education
Evelyn Kitagawa and Phillip Hauser
Some jobs have more social prestige than others, giving people with that job higher social standing
Occupational prestige
A structure of socially interrelated people
Social network
Opportunities for social engagement, money, and access to information on jobs or health care that can ultimately lead to better health.
Social support
The social elements of your work, school, or neighborhood
Social environment
Includes built features of the neighborhood such as housing, green spaces such as parks, services and amenities such as grocery stores, and toxic substances like air pollution.
Physical environment
Wrote about the stigma of mental illness
Erving Goffman
A mark or label that discredits a person as a form of social control
Stigma
A widely-shared perception about the characteristics or abilities of members of a particular group
Stereotype
Bearing the mark of a stigmatized group, even without sharing the underlying characteristics, can impact health
Spillover effect
Unfair treatment of one person by another
Interpersonal discrimination
Described stress proliferation
Leonard Pearlin
When one stressful event leads to a series of other stressful events and situations
Stress proliferation
Helped us understand the stressful experiences of Black men and women as they negotiate everyday American life
Joe Feagin and Philomena Essed
Includes the anticipation and worry stress that comes with membership in a socially marginalized and stigmatized group.
Vigilance
In this framework, the individual is placed within their interpersonal, community, and societal contexts
Socio-ecological framework
Our social experiences and health are interrelated throughout our lives
Life course perspective
Outlined a theory of the life course related to child development, and many sociologists have adapted this perspective to the study of health
Glen Elder
An outbreak of infectious disease that occurs over a wide geographical area and that is of high prevalence, generally affecting a significant proportion of the world’s population, usually over the course of several months.
Pandemic
Outbreaks of disease confined to one part of the world, such as a single country
Epidemics
In which sociologists and other social scientists work with geneticists to understand how the social world might alter the structure and function of our genome and affect social patterns in health
Social genomics
Focuses on how social control operates through the medical profession, both directly and indirectly
Medical sociology
A measure of social and economic standing
Socioeconomic status (SES)
