Social and Psychosocial Flashcards
What is the biomedical model?
Concept that the mind and body are separate
- body is treated like a machine it is fixed by replacing/ destroying cause of the problem
Criticism of biomedical model
Narrow - ignores social + psychosocial factors
What is the biopsychosocial model?
Health and illness emerge from an interplay of psycho social and bio factors (contributing
Causes of illness)
What is health?
Complete state of mental physical and social wellbeing . -not just the absence of disease
What are psychological factors?
Cognition, emotion, benaviour
What are social factors?
Housing, social class, employment, gender, social support etc.
What are biological factors?
Physiology, genetics pathogens (disease)
What are lay beliefs?
Beliefs of health and illness from people with no medical knowledge
Why are lay beliefs significant?
Impact on compliance + non compliance of treatment
What is the negative definition of health?
Health is the absence of illness
What is the functional definition of health?
A person is healthy if they can do certain things
What is the positive definition of health?
Good health is a state of wellbeing + fitness
What are lay theories?
How people understand their health using cultural, social and personal experience
What is lay epidemiology?
- Trying to understand how and why they have this illness
- constructing a story
Why do people have lay beliefs?
- they misunderstand the illness and who should/can get ill
What is the interplay between lay and medical beliefs ( public and professionals) ?
- Public - are surrounded by complicated medical concepts with no background knowledge/context → so they develop their own beliefs
- professionals - use medical concepts all the time and apply these to different experiences
What is health behaviour?
Impact on health or helps prevent illness
What is illness behaviour?
Activities of ill people to define illness and seek solutions
What is sick role behaviour?
The formal response to symptoms
- patients must act in a certain way to be a patient
Give an example of a health behaviour
Smoking → more prevalent in lower classes
- higher classes = more likely to have positive health definitions and incentives to quit smoking
- lower classes = tend to have unclear or negative definitions of health, smokingmay be used as a coping mechanism
What is illness behaviour?
How people act when they are sick
Describe the illness iceberg
Doctors only see the surface of the illness (top of iceberg above surface)
Most symptoms are never shown to a doctor (rest of iceberg beneath the surface)
Give 5 factors that influence illness behaviour
→ culture → understanding of illness → visibility of symptoms (how obvious) → Frequency and persistance of symptoms → availability of resources (accessibility)
What is lay referral?
When a patient decides whether or not to visit the doctor → they do this by discussing their symptoms with other lay people first