Topical Description of Medical Sociology
- Social Aetiology of Disease. ...
- Cultural Beliefs and Social Response to Illness. ...
- Sociology of Medical Care and Hospital. ...
- Sociology of Psychiatry or Social Psychiatry. ...
- Social Transition and Heath Care. ...
- Traditional Medicine/Complementary and Alternative Medicine. ...
- Sociology of Bioethics. ...
- Heath Policy and Politics. ...
- Social Epidemiology. ...
How does sociology is related to medicine?
- It is an objective condition. This implies that it can be empirically defined. ...
- It has social aetiology or could be linked to it. This implies that a social problem emanates from the pattern of social interaction, organisation, association, or simply is engendered by ...
- It poses social damage. ...
- It affects the collectivity. ...
- It requires social action. ...
What is the nature and scope of medical sociology?
What makes medical sociology important is the significant role social factors play in determining the health of individuals, groups, and the larger society. Social conditions and situations not only cause illness, but they also help prevent it.
What is the importance study of medical sociology?
- LAST REVIEWED: 12 September 2018
- LAST MODIFIED: 28 September 2016
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0034
How does sociology relate to health care?
- Not held responsible for being sick.
- Not responsible for normal duties.
- Not supposed to like the role.
- Supposed to seek help to get out of the role.
What is medical sociology?
Medical Sociology: Definition, History, Scope, Perspectives. The branch of sociology that deals with the study and analysis of medical organizations and institutions, and how social and cultural factors affect the domains of health and medicine, in sociological terms is called medical sociology. It is sometimes, also referred to as health sociology.
How does sociology work in medical research?
Medical sociology works in various disciplinary settings in research, while social medicine generally functions within the framework of biological and medical scientists. In both these domains, academic knowledge and skills differ since their purposes are not the same. In terms of research in the two disciplines, ...
How does sociology help in healthcare?
They can apply their knowledge about the social contexts to facilitate improved healthcare agencies, organizational arrangements, and processes of care. In short, knowledge in medical sociology helps in the improvement of health and wellbeing of the society as a whole.
When did sociology start?
Sociology and allopathic medicine, two embryonic sciences, began to make contact in modest but major ways in the late 19th century . This historical period saw the beginnings of allopathic medicine’s continuous attempts to cement its professional powers and societal credibility. The early date and limited length of these connections between medicine and sociology reflected a much larger shift occurring both inside allopathy and between medicine and society, as both hurried to confirm medicine’s “scientific side” (Starr as cited in Hafferty, 2019). However, as medicine advanced in clinical efficacy and organisational intricacy, the social and behavioural aspects of medicine began to diminish, with education, research, and principles consigned to “second-order” medical areas like psychiatry and public health. The subject of medical sociology saw rapid development in the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the early 1970s (Bloom as cited in Hafferty, 2019). Throughout these two decades, the discipline has had significant academic enthusiasm and prosperity, including what is now considered a generous amount of grant money from both private foundations and the government.
How do social scientists gain knowledge?
They can acquire knowledge about the complex process in which social issues affect the health of the people living in a particular society . They can study the already existing data about those effects and offer additional information to them or how those social issues can be solved and eradicated.
What is health as against illness?
Health, as against illness, is defined as: ‘The state of the optimum capacity of an individual for the effective performance of the roles and tasks for which s/he has been socialised. ’. ( Parsons, 1951). Thus, from a functionalist standpoint, health becomes a requirement for the proper operation of society.
What is the purpose of social assessment?
Assessing and describing the way individuals react to illnesses, in order to anticipate how they will be defined from the viewpoint of their social and cultural group within that society. It describes how society dictates illness treatment methods. Looking at how social institutions help medical organisations in their efforts to care for the ill.
What is medical sociology?
e. Medical sociology is the sociological analysis of medical organizations and institutions; the production of knowledge and selection of methods, the actions and interactions of healthcare professionals, and the social or cultural (rather than clinical or bodily) effects of medical practice. The field commonly interacts with the sociology ...
When was sociology introduced to the medical curriculum?
In Britain, sociology was introduced into the medical curriculum following the Goodenough report in 1944 : "In medicine, 'social explanations' of the aetiology of disease meant for some doctors a redirection of medical thought from the purely clinical and psychological criteria of illness.
What was the medical paternalism of the 1970s?
Freidson writing in the 1970s referred to medicine as having "professional dominance" determining its work and defining a conceptualization of the problems that are brought to it and the best solutions.
What are the social effects of bioethics?
Informed consent, having its roots in biothetics, is the process by which a doctor and a patient agree to a particular intervention and has. Medical sociology study the social processes that influences and at times limit consent.
What is bioethics in medical research?
Bioethics studies ethical concern in medical treatment and research. Many scholars believe that bioethics arose due to a perceived lack of accountability of the medical profession, the field has been broadly adopted with most US hospitals offering some form of ethical consultation. The social effects of the field of bioethics have been studied by medical sociologists. Informed consent, having its roots in biothetics, is the process by which a doctor and a patient agree to a particular intervention and has. Medical sociology study the social processes that influences and at times limit consent.
What did Parsons argue about the relationship between the doctor and the patient?
Parsons argued that though there was an asymmetry of knowledge and power in the doctor patient relationship the medical system provided sufficient safeguards to protect the patient justifying a paternalistic role by the doctor and medical system.
What is the doctor-patient relationship?
The doctor–patient relationship, the social interactions between healthcare providers and those who interact with them, is studied by medical sociology. There are different models for the interaction between a patient and doctor, which may have been more or less prevalent at different times.
What is medical sociology?
Medical Sociology. Medical sociology is a subdiscipline of sociology that studies the social causes and consequences of health and illness (Cockerham 2004). Major areas of investigation include the social aspects of health and disease, the social behavior of health care workers and the people who utilize their services, ...
Why is sociology important in medical research?
What makes medical sociology important is the significant role social factors play in determining the health of individuals, groups, and the larger society. Social conditions and situations not only cause illness, but they also help prevent it.
What was the decisive event that took place in medical sociology in 1951?
A decisive event took place in medical sociology in 1951 that provided a theoretical direction to a formerly applied field. This was the appearance of Parsons’s The Social System. This book, written to explain a complex structural functionalist model of society, contained Parsons’s concept of the sick role.
Why did medical sociology evolve?
Medical sociology evolved as a specialty in sociology in response to funding agencies and policymakers after World War II who viewed it as an applied field that could produce knowledge for use in medical practice, public health campaigns, and health policy formulation.
What are the two areas of sociology?
This situation led Robert Straus (1957) to suggest that medical sociology had become divided into two areas: sociology in medicine and sociology of medicine. The sociologist in medicine performed applied research and analysis primarily motivated by a medical problem rather than a sociological problem.
Where do medical sociologists work?
Medical sociologists work not only in university sociology departments, medical, nursing, and public health schools and various other health related professional schools, but also in research organizations and government agencies.
What was the significance of symbolic interaction in medical sociology?
With the introduction of symbolic interaction into a field that had previously been dominated by structural functionalism, medical sociology became a significant arena of debate between two of sociology’s major theoretical schools. This debate helped stimulate a virtual flood of publications in medical sociology in the 1960s.
What is medical sociology?
Some have argued that medical sociology should be thought of as a loosely connected network of disparate subgroups rather than as a single discipline. Many medical sociologists tend to argue against certain axioms in the biomedical model of health and illness. They reject the reductivist approach of biomedicine, which claims that health and disease are natural phenomena that exist in the individual body rather than in the interaction of the individual and the social world; they reject the doctrine of specific etiology, the vision that disease can be induced by introducing a single specific factor into a healthy animal; and they reject biomedicine's claim to scientific neutrality. Like sociology in general, subgroups within medical sociology vary according to dichotomies such as human agency versus social structure, conflict versus consensus, and idealism versus realism. Subgroups also vary according to subject matter, thus the sociology of medicine can be distinguished from the sociology of health and illness, the sociology of healers, and the sociology of the health care system. Medical sociologists also distinguish between the sociology of health, the study of health, illness, and health care to further sociological theory; and sociology in health, the use of sociological insights to complement biomedicine's objectives and priorities. There are four often interrelated areas of research in medical sociology: the social production of health and illness, the social construction of health and illness, postmodern perspectives on health and illness, and the study of the health care system and its constituent parts.
Is medical sociology a subdiscipline?
Over the past several decades medical sociology has become a major subdiscipline of sociology, at the same time assuming an increasingly conspicuous role in health care disciplines such as public health, health care management, nursing, and clinical medicine. The name medical sociology garners immediate recognition and legitimacy and, thus, continues to be widely used—for instance, to designate the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association—even though most scholars in the area concede that the term is narrow and misleading. Many courses and texts, rather than using the term "sociology of medicine," refer instead to the sociology of health, health and health care, health and illness, health and medicine, or health and healing. The study of medicine is only part of the sociological study of health and health care, a broad field ranging from (1) social epidemiology, the study of socioeconomic, demographic, and behavioral factors in the etiology of disease and mortality; to (2) studies of the development and organizational dynamics of health occupations and professions, hospitals, health maintenance and long-term care organizations, including interorganizational relationships as well as interpersonal behavior, for example, between physician and patient; to (3) the reactions of societies to illness, including cultural meanings and normative expectations and, reciprocally, the reactions of individuals in interpreting, negotiating, managing, and socially constructing illness experience; to (4) the social policies, social movements, politics, and economic conditions that shape and are shaped by health and disease within single countries, as well as in a comparative, international context.
Overview
- While sociology is a comprehensive study of human behaviour in society, the systematic study of medical sociology studies the ways in which people address health and wellbeing concerns, diseases and illnesses, and medical services for not only the sick but also the healthy. Physical, mental and social aspects of health and disease are studied by me...
Related fields
History
The Medical Profession
Medicalization
Social medicine is a similar field to medical sociology in that it tries to conceptualize social interactions in investigating how the study of social interactions can be used in medicine. However, the two fields have different training, career paths, titles, funding and publication. In the 2010s, Rose and Callard argued that this distinction may be arbitrary.
In the 1950s, Strauss argued that it was important to maintain the independence of medical soci…
Social construction of illness
Samuel W. Bloom argues that the study of medical sociology has a long history but tended to be done as a one of advocacy in response to social events rather than a field of study. He cites the 1842 publication of the sanitary conditions of the labouring population of Great Britain as a good example of such research. This medical sociology included an element of social science, studying social structures as a cause or mediating factor in disease, such as for public health or social me…
The Doctor-Patient relationship
The profession of medicine has been studied by sociologists. Talcott Parsons looked at the profession from a functionalist perspective, focusing on medics roles as experts, their altruism, and how they support communities. Other sociologists have taken a conflict theory perspective, looking at how the medical profession secures its own interests. Of these, Marxist conflict theory perspective considers how the ruling classes can enact power through medicine, while other the…
Bioethics
Medicalization describe the process whereby an ever wider range of human experiences are understood is defined, experienced and treated as a medical condition. Examples of medicalization can be seen in deviance such as defining addiction or antisocial personality disorder as a medical condition. Feminist scholars have shown that the female body is prone to medicalization, arguing that the tendency of viewing the female body as the other has been a fact…