Sociological Perspectives M3 D2

870 Words4 Pages
Concepts | What is it? | Strengths | Weaknesses | Positive definitions | Health is seen as a process. A person achieves a healthy state through their own efforts in maintaining themselves. For example eating a balanced diet, getting enough rest, not drinking to excess etc. | Takes the health of the person on whole prospective, mind, body and soul. It includes the state of a person’s well-being and health rather than just medical illnesses/diseases. | It may prove quite difficult to get a person to change their daily routines in order to stay healthy. Some people are very stuck in their ways or may not want to change as they think what they are eating etc. is fine. | Negative definitions | Seen as the absence of any physical illness or disease. | Focuses solely on curing the patient. Medicine/treatment will be given straight away. | Doesn’t include the social and emotional well-being of a person. The person may be cured from a particular illness but still feel unwell in themselves. | Biomedical model | The human body is regarded as a machine and illness as a malfunction of the machine. Ill health is treated as an ‘external attack’ on the body and the symptoms are the evidence – it is a temporary state that can be fixed. The health professional is the only person with the expertise to tell whether a person is sick or not. | It is very effective at diagnosing and treating most diseases, by establishing the reasons that a disease occurs, and in coming up with very effective treatment regimes. Diagnosis is based on breaking the problem down into parts and the cause and effect link is linear. | Little regard is paid to the environmental, social and physiological and social factors that may have led to ill health. For example the doctor gives medicine to a patient suffering from headaches, ignoring the fact
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