Assessment Of Biomedical And Socio-medical Approaches To Health And Ill Health, Sociological Perspectives On Patterns And Trends Of Health And Illness In Two Social Groups

Socio-Medical Model

1. Assess the biomedical and social medical approaches to health and ill health.

2. you need to use three different sociological perspectives to discuss patterns and trends of health and illness in two chosen social groups.

3. you also need to evaluate your sociological explanation of the patterns and trends of health and ill health in the two social groups.

The models focus is on the various types of social factors which have a direct influence on any person’s well – being and health. It also keeps an eye on the facets of society for an individual like pollution, improper diet, inappropriate housing conditions, increasing poverty, etc. to take actions for the prevention of ill-health. The Socio-medical model tries to keep the health of any individual in the right track. It also defer the assumptions of the medical model and always try to consider numerous options available.

The strengths of the Socio-Medical model can be attributed to the fact that it tries to encourage each and every individual to live a healthy life. It tries to find the root causes of the illness and work on them to eradicate them or prevent them from the base root. It is a fact that everyone knows that the medical condition of any individual can improve if his social conditions are improved.
As far as the weakness is concerned, the socio-medical model fails in looking at the diseases from bio-medical perspective. The model does not have the flexibility to identify the cause of the illness if there is no symptoms present from the upper level (Balán, 2014). It fails to deliver at the time of emergency and cannot address the issues faced by the individual. It does not find people with the expertise to carry out any immediate response needed by the patient.

It is the model which is being used by most of the Health Care experts in all parts of the world. It is used to find out the nature of the medical issues being felt by the patients. This model aims at the health of an individual which is free from any defect, disease of pain. The model keeps a keen eye on the physical processes which can have an impact on the individual’s health. The model suggests that an illness occurs due to any medical cause in the body and hence can be cured after the Health Care experts look at the issue. The person can lead a normal and healthy life after he or she has been cured. It leads to the trust of many individual to go for the bio-medical model.

Biomedical Model

The strengths of the bio-medical model are that it focuses on the diagnosis of all the diseases from a scientific point of view. It bases all the assumptions on the prior research done by experts in that domain. It believes that the disease is caused due to some illness, and it can be cured by taking appropriate medication (Maslach, 2013). If required, the illness can be treated with the help of surgery or drugs. The symptoms shown by the body of the individual is closely followed, and an apt decision is taken after all the tests are done. It helps in leaving all the chances of failure out of the question. It becomes the greatest strength of this model.

The weakness of the bio-medical model is that it fails to focus on the psychological factors related to any disease for an individual. In this model, there is little to no role of the individual in the treatment process (Barr, 2014). He undergoes the treatment by taking medication or by undergoing surgeries and then waits to get back to the normal condition. The model fails to look into the side effects which may come to the surface during the treatment of the individual. The side effects should be handled by the expert as and when it appears.

Ethnic minority groups

The ethnic minority groups live in very poor conditions. They are deprived of proper housing conditions. They tend to live in certain inner areas and also suffers from the high unemployment rate. The people are deprived of many necessities (Lowes, 2013). The lack of necessities is one of the sociological perspectives which shows the pattern of illness in the ethnic minority group. Due to this, the people of this origin face an issue in getting treated. Another perspective is the lack of good contacts due to biases for the black and white people within the ethnic groups. It also impairs the people from getting good response for health care facilities. The unemployment among the group is a major perspective which ultimately leads to the inability of the people to get themselves better illness treating facilities (British Medical Association, 2013).

Socio-Economic Class

The class of a person to which he/she belongs plays a very important role in the lifestyle. The access to various facilities also depends on the class of the people. A person of the higher socio-economic class will have access to better healthcare facilities and hence he can enjoy a better life expectancy. The health of that person is also expected to be better than the person present in a lower socio-economic group (Cockerham, 2014). It is because the person at the higher social group will be living in proper housing conditions, with better transport facilities and better environmental conditions. These will be inaccessible to the person at lower income group. This fact suggests that if the person is in the lower socio-economic group, the health and illness will be affected by the patterns and trends. These patterns will be of illness related conditions since the person is not getting adequate facilities to survive in a healthy manner. The social class of a person will greatly impact the health of the person (Kaufmann, 2015).

Sociological Perspectives on Patterns and Trends of Health and Illness in Ethnic Minority Groups

Social mobility of many societies has limited options. Many people, who born in any class tend to remain in the same class (Bjørnskov, 2013). It follows the suit of Marxism approach. The person at higher upper class will have many exceptional facilities like private health care etc. However, the people with lower income group will have to go to the public hospitals and get themselves treated in those conditions.

From another perspective, the trend and patterns of health and illness can be seen from the way the people react to alcohol and smoking related habits. A person at the higher socio-economic group will have easy access to dangerous drugs and alcohols. However, it is up to them whether to go for it or not. The person who adopts these will have a lower life expectancy. On the other hand, a person at lower income group can also exercise these drugs and can decrease his or her life expectancy (Eyles, 2014). However, if the person at lower income group also do regular exercise and remain parted with these drugs and alcohol, then his life expectancy will also increase. If a person performs the responsibilities in a well-defined manner, he can try to move up the ladder from lower income group to the higher income group.

In this section, it is tried to continue the previous sections and finally, come to the conclusion. This will be done by evaluating the sociological explanations by the social groups so chosen.

This explanation suggests that the person’s low social class is not the primary reason behind the increase in illness and mortality rates. People will be in lower class because of the ill health. The possible reasons for this include the weakness and low metabolism in the ill health people which will force them to quit and will not be ready for getting success and promotion (Gabe, 2014). There is a weakness to the Natural Social Selection that there is not enough proof to project the cause of ill health. The strength of this explanation is that the absence of energy can be related to ill health, and it can be corrected so as to eradicate the ill health conditions.

Cultural and behavioral explanation tend to project the ways the behaviour of the people impacts their choices. The behaviour of the lower class people is such that they tend to drink more and smoke heavily. It causes their health to deteriorate. The choice of these people will lead them to face several diseases and can also lead to certain chronic ailments from which they might never recover (Herz, 2015). The weakness of the behavioural explanation is that it tends to have a bias regarding the lower income people and act in a stereotypical manner. It shows that lower income group people get involved in smoking and drinking activities but these can be exercised by higher income group people as well. The strength can be that if the lower economic class people try to control the behaviour and take care of eating and drinking habits, then he may move up the social ladder.

References

Balán, J., Browning, H. L., & Jelin, E. (2014). Men in a developing society: Geographic and social mobility in Monterrey, Mexico (Vol. 30). University of Texas Press.

Barr, D. A. (2014). Health disparities in the United States: Social class, race, ethnicity, and health. JHU Press.

Bjørnskov, C., Dreher, A., Fischer, J. A., Schnellenbach, J., & Gehring, K. (2013). Inequality and happiness: When perceived social mobility and economic reality do not match. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 91, 75-92.

British Medical Association. (2013). Health and environmental impact assessment: an integrated approach. Routledge.

Cockerham, W. C. (2014). Medical sociology. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Dahl, E., & van der Wel, K. A. (2013). Educational inequalities in health in European welfare states: a social expenditure approach. Social Science & Medicine, 81, 60-69.

Eyles, J., & Woods, K. J. (2014). The Social Geography of Medicine and Health (RLE Social & Cultural Geography). Routledge.

Gabe, J., & Monaghan, L. (2013). Key concepts in medical sociology. Sage.

Herz, L. (2015). Growing into poverty? Social Mobility and Child Poverty in Welfare States.

Kaufmann, V., & Viry, G. (2015). High Mobility as Social Phenomenon. In High Mobility in Europe (pp. 1-15). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Lowes, L., & Hulatt, I. (Eds.). (2013). Involving service users in health and social care research. Routledge.

Maslach, C., & Jackson, S. E. (2013). A social psychological analysis. Social psychology of health and illness, 227.