Chapter 19- Medicine and Health – Flashcards

a society's standard ways of dealing with illness and injury

the healing specialist of a tribe who attempts to control the spirits thought to cause a disease or injury; commonly called a witch doctor

you are not responsible for being sick, you're exempt from normal responsibilities, you don't like the sick role, and you will get competent help so you can return to your routines

ambiguity:occurs with illnesses that are not clear cut like broken bones and when social interests conflict... gatekeepers: keep too many people from claiming the sick role ex: parents... gender dimensions: females are more likely than males to claim the sick role and are more likely to be admitted to hospitals

the sick role doesn't match the ideal that most men try to project - being strong and tough and shit

-first nations to industrialize gained the economic and military power that allowed them to dominate other nations. Highly industrialized nations have excellent health care while the least industrialized nations don't have the trained physicians or technology to even have decent health care. More industrialized countries have "luxury" diseases like heart disease and cancer because we live long enough to get them

-people in more industrialized nations are expected to live longer

-less industrialized nations have higher infant mortality rates while in most industrialized nations fewer than 7 of every 1,000 babies born dies

Flexner report led to prof of medicine: the development of medicine into a specialty that requires physicians to 1) obtain a rigorous education, 2) regulate themselves, 3) take authority over clients, 4) claim a theoretical understanding of illness, and 5) present themselves as doing a service to society rather than just following a self-interest... Flexner advised philanthropies on which schools they should fund based on how promising they were and as a result there was a decrease in medical schools, because many weren't competent enough

-today's two leading causes of death are heart disease and cancer. In 1900, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and diarrhea were at the top, and the last two don't even show up on the top ten today... these shifts reveal the social nature of disease and death

health is a human condition measured by four components: physical, mental, social, and spiritual

-if it was a right, all citizens would have equal access to it

-health care is a commodity... rich have access to one kind while poor have access to another

two-tier system of medical care: wealthy receive superior medical care and poor receive inferior medical care.. health also decreases as you go lower on the social ladder

physicians use to attribute sickness to "bad fluids" and used techniques such as 1)bleeding 2)blistering 3)vomiting and 4)purging to rid body of this bad fluid. Back then, physicians probably killed more patients than they cured due to this incompetence. Today, physicians are held to very high standards and aren't excused for mistakes so they practice defensive medicine- medical practices done not for the patient's benefit but in order to protect physicians from malpractice suits

most cases in Africa.. in US, hits men the hardest, but proportion of women cases is growing.. African American women 15 times more likely than white women to get it due to social factors, not biological..

many cases of organizations and teams of doctors purposely infecting people with deadly diseases or exposing them to chemicals to see what happened.. always experimented with poor especially Puerto Ricans and sex workers

- some variation of the flu, ebola, SARS, Asian bird flu, TB,