HEALTH, ILLNESS AND SOCIETY

Health, Illness and Society

Health, Illness and Society

Introduction

Disease or Sickness is the entities suspected of causing harm to an organism in biological as well as social functioning. Altered health state in a culture is deemed of causing vulnerabilities to reproduction, ability to care for loved ones and body metabolisms. Illness in every society is thought to interfere with the primary activities and social behaviours of an individual. Biomedicine has strict confrontations to be made against conventional treating remedies as it does not believe in their spiritual or herbal concept of healing.

Discussion

Bio-medical and Social Concepts and Critiques

When we review literature, three important theories come forward. Naturalist perceives health on evidence based scientific theories. Normative associates' health to moral and value evaluation and Hybrid theories believe in both the scenarios. There have always been physiological and judgments based health definitions and none finds preference over the other, but overall medical description of the health state receives major accreditation (Anderson, 2002).

The conceptions to health and its various models have developed over centuries; the first donates to biomedical model that focuses on physiological existence of sign and symptoms of disease. Where as the widely accepted Holistic Model considers much diversified approaches of social, physical and psychological influences like emotions and feelings. The imperative result will be extracted from the combined and unifying concepts of biomedical and holistic model.

The biomedical concept has primarily evolved as a thought process of practitioners for several hundred years. It based all biological functions as the sole of health and rejects any involvements of social or psychological phenomenon in causing infirmity. The principle on which biomedical model works is the mind-body dualism process, in which physiological functions of the body are entirely different from mind and psychological sciences.

According to Chloe E. Bird and Patricia P. Rieker, Biomedicine has subsequently ...