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Medical sociology can also be defined as the scientific study of the social patterning of health. In this case, it is a study of how social factors (e.g., class, race, gender, religion , ethnicity, kinship network, marriage, educational status, age, place , and cultural practices) influence human health.
Table 13.1 “Theory Snapshot” summarizes what they say. Good health and effective medical care are essential for the smooth functioning of society. Patients must perform the “sick role” in order to be perceived as legitimately ill and to be exempt from their normal obligations.
Sick role is a term used in medical sociology regarding sickness and the rights and obligations of the affected. It is a concept created by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons in 1951. Parsons was a functionalist sociologist who argued that being sick means that the sufferer enters a role of “sanctioned deviance”.
7.4.2 Sick role and functionalist perspective. Health is vital to the stability of the society, so illness is often seen as a form of deviance. Talcott Parsons (1951), an American sociologist who was the first to systematize the study of social systems, and is considered one of the fathers of American mid-century sociology, was the first to ...
- INTRODUCTION
- Sociology, Genetics, Social Mobility and Lifestyle
- ABORIGINALITY, LIFESTYLE AND GENETICS – OBSCURING SOCIAL PROCESSES
- The Sociological Perspective
- MODERN SOCIETY MAY HAVE CHANGED – BUT KEY SOCIAL STRUCTURES PERSIST
- Sociological Approaches to Health and Illness
- Political Economy and Marxist Approaches
- Parsonian Sociology of Health
- Foucault’s Sociology of Health
- Feminist Approaches
- Bringing the Approaches Together
- SOCIOLOGY, SCIENCE AND MEDICINE
- Summary
- Discussion Questions
{{ Diseases are socially produced and distributed – they are not just a part of nature or biology. {{ The key variables shaping the production and distribution of diseases are class, gender and ethnicity, and the ways in which professional groups define conditions as diseases. {{ Medical knowledge is not purely scientific, but shapes and is shaped ...
Sociologists argue that our understanding of the social production of disease is not helped by explanations: that focus solely on genetics at the expense of the social environment; that claim that the sick are poor because they experience downward social mobility; that fail to recognize that lifestyle choices are shaped by social factors. In our da...
In Australia, it is claimed that Aboriginal people have higher rates of diabetes because they freely choose bad Western foods such as potato chips, soft drinks and alcohol, for which they are genetically not ‘programmed’. Thus their health problems read as the following equation. They choose poor foods (therefore it is their fault) + they are genet...
Sociologists, on the basis of empirical research, demonstrate how the interactions of class, of professional interests, of power, of gender and of ethnicity enter into the formation of knowledge about and treatment of a sickness or disease. They dem-onstrate the social production and distribution of diseases and illnesses. Sociologists show how dis...
It is the argument of this book that there is little evidence that social structures of class and gender, of ethnicity and of inequality have stopped shaping people’s lives. Industrial capitalism may have changed its appearance, and patriarchy may no longer be the bulwark of women’s oppression, but they both still structure health and illness, and ...
Different sociological perspectives on society give rise to different accounts of the role of medical knowledge, and of the social causes of disease. They are also based in different sociological models of society, in part complementary, in part contradictory. Marxist approaches emphasize the causal role of economics in the production and distribut...
Researchers in the materialist and Marxist traditions have produced one of the most powerful sociological accounts of the production of disease and its social pattern of distribution. These approaches emphasize the determining role of eco-nomic interests in both producing disease and in shaping the way it is dealt with. Marxists argue that medicine...
An alternative analysis of medicine is provided by Talcott Parsons, who argued that modern societies, while having a capitalist economy, have noncapitalist social struc-tures. He argues that the medical profession is one such structure. Medical professionals are motivated by factors other than making money, such as caring for their patients. They p...
It is with the development of the category of disease – the product of the professionalization of medicine – that Foucault is concerned. Michel Foucault calls attention to another important aspect of modern society: it is an admin-istered society, in which professional groups define categories of people – the sick, the insane, the criminal, the dev...
It is the case that the Marxists overlook the ways in which contemporary life is not always shaped by economic factors; that Parsons does not go very far in document-ing the ‘strains’ of social life; and that for all his interest in bodies, Foucault does not discuss gender. Feminist sociology seeks to extend and develop especially Marxist and Fouca...
There is no definitive cause of inequality in health and in the patterns of disease distribution. Class, patriarchy and bureaucratic and professional surveillance inter-mingle with each other in shaping the contents of medical knowledge and the individual’s experience of health and disease. In addition to class and gender, as a result of the massiv...
The assumption that unifies sociological accounts of sickness and disease is a rejection of behaviourism, the claim that we passively respond to environmental factors, as a model for human action. Health and disease are cultural products, and individuals as social agents react to, transform and are shaped by the experiences of health and disease. T...
The ‘commonsense’ understandings of the cause of disease portrayed in our culture – especially the idea that lifestyles are freely chosen – individualizes and obscures the way in which disease is socially produced. The commonsense understanding of medicine as the application of ‘objective’ ‘scientific’ knowledge to a purely biological body obscures...
Different theories of society produce different accounts of the role of medicine in modern society. Compare and contrast two of the theories outlined in this chapter. What does it mean when sociologists argue that diseases are social products and not just biological facts? Can you think of conditions that were once thought of as normal but now requ...
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4 days ago · Quick Reference. A field of sociology concerned with the social dimensions of health and illness, it covers three main areas: namely, the conceptualization of health and illness; the study of their measurement and social distribution; and the explanation of patterns of health and illness. Clarification of the concepts of health and illness is ...
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What is sick role in sociology?
The view of illness as a social role is based on the premise that the behaviour of patients, doctors and carers is related to social perceptions or constructs of sickness. 2. The sick role. Parsons (1951) described the ‘sick role’ as the rights and responsibilities of people who are sick. Rights include exemption from normal ...
