Health and illness
SOC 131
Defining our terms
Let’s begin with some formal definitions.
- Health refers to a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being.
- Illness refers to the subjective experience of a disease, a condition, or a set of symptoms.
- Impairment refers to the loss of function associated with a disease or health condition
- Disability, another common term in our discussions of health and illness, refers to limitations that are created when an impairment isn’t accommodated in the physical and social environment.
What does sociology have to say about health?
Discussion of health and illness are usually the purview of “health professionals” in the fields of medicine and epistemology (or public health). But this section of our class aims to demonstrate that sociology has an important role to play in understanding both morbidity (having a disease) and mortality (death).
Let’s think about the example of racial inequities in infant mortality.
- How would epidemiologists explain the health inequities across the US racial/ethnic groups seen in this chart?
- How would sociologists explain them?
The sociological lens on health
Consider the following quote from the text:
Infant mortality is not a health problem. Infant mortality is a social problem with health consequences. In conversation with your neighbors, discuss that quote.
- How can this help us understand the difference between the sociological approach and medical/epistemological approaches to a problem like infant mortality?
- Can you come up with another example (beyond the ones used in our text!) where the claim “X is not a health problem; it’s a social problem with health consequences” would make sense?
Social control and the medical profession
One major concern of the sub-field of medical sociology is the way(s) that social control is exercised through the medical profession.