Curing Rather Than Caring.
How do people in the medical field manage this? With these chronic stressors and exposures, what are the effects that take toll in their personal lives. The human brain isn't meant to experience death or traumatic experiences at such high rates. What does this contribute to their life expectancy?
Emphasis on the social determinants of health. In Chapter 3, the concept of social determinants of health was introduced. Although Rudolph Virchow and others in the mid-nineteenth century emphasized that social determinants and disparities are major influences on health and disease, only recently has medical education begun to reflect this importance. In part, this has been stimulated by the increasing prevalence of chronic diseases as causes of suffering and death and to the important influence on them of factors such as gender, race and ethnicity, income, education, and sexual orientation and gender identity.
It is vital to consider the social location in regards to social determents in health. This was also mentioned in the documentary we watched in class as well as the one we were instructed to watch on our own. Why is it only recently we are studying this? What are we doing about it?
For example, in 2021, Blacks were 12.4 percent of the population and 11.3 percent of first-year medical students. Hispanics were 16.3 percent of the population and 12.7 percent of first-year students. The percentage of first-year students for both groups was up significantly from previous years
As mentioned in the documentary it is noted that underrepresentation in healthcare. One of the students even mentioned that we need more black doctors because of how disproportional health care is amongst the black population, and how their care differentiates from others.
Non-Hispanic Blacks were more likely than all other racial-ethnic groups to report that they probably or definitely would not get vaccinated.
As mentioned in the documentary, this can be due to fear of being an experiment in relations to history in gynecology and the Tuskegee experiment and not being listened to or taken seriously by doctors.
Why is so little attention devoted to macro-level factors? At least three reasons seem important. First, using social policy and the force of laws to regulate individual behavior is viewed by some as contradicting the cultural value of individualism
There are many ideas behind these ideas of using the sociological imagination such as:
-Personal trouble VS Public issues -Micro VS Micro approaches -Upstream VS Downstream -Indivisualism VS Collectivism -Person blame VS System Blame -Agency
Fast-food restaurants are often located near schools, and many students eat meals or snacks there. Students whose school is within half a mile of a fast-food restaurant consume more soft drinks, eat fewer fruits and vegetables, and are more likely to be overweight (
This reminds me of the documentary we watched, it considered that black neighborhoods were surrounded by fast food and it became there only option. The doctors even said that they don't blame the patient because it was almost as if they were forced to eat there. I think this is relevant in influence for schools as well.
Yet most efforts are directed downstream at individual smokers rather than upstream at the tobacco industry.
It is interesting to learn that macro-level approaches focus on upstream approaches while micro-level focuses on downstream. This is also similar to personal troubles versus societal issues. It goes from broad to narrow in the sense of downstream being an individual basis where upstream has to do with laws and government, a bigger approach.
cogently argues that with regard to preventive health actions, we have spent most of our time downstream being preoccupied with encouraging people to avoid risky behaviors while we have neglected the consumer products, physical structures, social structures, and media messages upstream that create and promote risky behaviors.
This is vital in shifting from a personal trouble to a societal issue. The sociological imagination takes form here, listing the system blame approaches such as the macro approaches listed.
As discussed in Chapter 3, the most common means of transmitting HIV are having unprotected sex and sharing contaminated needles. In addition to abstinence and condom use, the risk of HIV transmission can be reduced through pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP. Recommended for persons at high risk of HIV infection (e.g., persons with other STIs, those who have unprotected sex with multiple partners, injection drug users, and persons with an HIV positive partner) and taken most frequently as a daily pill, PrEP reduces the risk of infection through sex by 99 percent.
I am curious if this is due to education as an underlying factor and the commonality of these groups (teenagers & those of the same sex) are not supported amongst societies standards of sexual interactions. Also a lot of programs are through schools or religious institutions so they practice abstinence based sex education.
These beliefs can be influenced by several other factors, including demographic (age, gender, socioeconomic status, and race/ethnicity), sociopsychological (personality, peer, and reference group pressure), and structural (knowledge about the disease, prior contact with the disease).
This is system blame, and shifting the spotlight away from individual choices that influence health.
The health belief model (HBM) provides a paradigm for understanding why some individuals engage in HPBs, while others behave in knowingly unhealthy ways. The model recognizes that, in making health decisions, individuals consider both health-related and non-health-related consequences of behavior.
I believe that HBM is a person blame approach due to its nature of identifying individuals as the problem rather than the conditions that influence them to make these decisions
eople in the lowest-income groups are also two to three times more likely to have a disability than people in higher-income groups. Between 2000 and 2015, rates of disability among the middle-aged (those 45–64 years)
There is a very big pattern regarding socioeconomic status, income, and access to resources.
Instead, race is an historical and social construct that captures differences in both the social circumstances faced by, and the social resources available to, various groups.
This emphasis that it is not fully due to the physiological circumstances but also the social circumstances one may face do to being apart of a certain group.
Racism leads to chronic stress for racial-ethnic minorities. The experience of racial discrimination is a source of everyday, chronic stress for racial-ethnic minorities that persists over the life course. The cumulative impacts of chronic stress caused by racism take a toll on the body, producing a higher burden of disease and death for racial minorities. This is sometimes referred to as a “weathering” effec
Stress can also result in immunosuppression.
Due to persistent residential segregation, racial-ethnic minorities often live in neighborhoods with fewer recreational opportunities (which negatively impacts physical activity levels), fewer grocery stores and more fast food outlets (which negatively impacts nutrition), more advertisements for health-harming substances (such as liquor, cigarettes, and vaping products), less protection and more crime (including poorer police and fire protection and more violence), more toxic environments (which increases disease risk and poor birth outcomes), and fewer and more poorly equipped medical centers. These neighborhood differences expose racial-ethnic minorities and whites to vastly different structural opportunities that impact health
Finances play a major role in health. What you have and do not have access to matters. This is a wider perspective than just individual because it considers not only the environment but also the groups that are likely to be effected by socioeconomic status.
These resources include knowledge, money, power, prestige, and social connections
Those who have access to healthcare or treatment
proximate risk factors
Would this be closely linked to infectious diseases?
refer to health-related individual behaviors and include diet, exercise, use of tobacco and alcohol, control of stress, and other aspects of lifestyle.
Would this be closely linked with chronic degenerative diseases rather than infectious diseases?
tracing the origin of chronic degenerative diseases is more complicated. Most chronic degenerative diseases have multiple causes (many related to lifestyle)
This is why we examine patterns in medical records and study them to better understand the causes based on commonalities of lifestyle.
spreading within unvaccinated subpopulations.
This was brought up I believe in chapter one. It highlights the idea that we have to use the sociological imagination to analyze this rather than simply blaming the person for not getting vaccinated, we would have to examine why the individual did not want to get vaccinated and what patterns followed as a result.
Worldwide travel increases the chances of a pathogen being contracted in one area and unwittingly transported to another.
This is vital to the spread of COVID-19, especially consider that they implemented little travel during the time and the doctors ask about travel during screenings when you are ill.
This double disease burden is uneven across socioeconomic groups, with poorer communities suffering disproportionately from both infectious and chronic conditions, while wealthier communities use their greater resources to escape much of the morbidity and mortality from infectious disease
This explains how different groups are affected by certain conditions or are at greater risk than others due to factors that aren't just physiological. These are also patterns that we are observing and studying.
has proposed that a fifth stage—the Age of Obesity and Inactivity—has been underway for the last few decades.
I wonder if this will shift again because of weight loss medications and being able to acknowledge, educate, and address the problem faster than we used to.
most low-income countries today exceeds that.
This hits on the facts that disease and illness can be a result and or influenced by social factors.
medical records and databases (e.g., birth and death records, hospital admissions data), health-focused surveys, and experiments.
These items are crucial in participating in research.
Epidemiologists scrutinize data on death and disease within populations searching for patterns or meaningful changes over time.
Sociologists study patterns.
(e.g., gender, race, and social class), lifestyle, and the social and physical environment (e.g., exposure to toxic substances, participation in social networks, and social stress) as underlying factors of disease and illness
I believe these are components of illness that we don't follow because they are minuscule compared to spreading germs, I think we focus less on the smaller but important ideals and how they effect different communities differently.
to learn what research has already been done
Archival Research
scientific method.
This is what make sociology a hard science although it is still debated widely.
It then becomes possible to analyze relationships of cause and effect and thus to explain why something happens and to predict that it will happen again under the same conditions in the future.
Does this also mean that correlation does not equal causation?
More specifically, sociologists attempt to describe social patterns and then find cause-and-effect relationships that explain them
This is through the scientific method.
The Health Care Syste
Would this be an institution?
he study of the ways that people perceive, interpret, and act in response to illness and disability
Could the mistrust of vaccines during COVID-19 be an example of this?
Epidemiology
Sociology studies patterns through the scientific method
creating greater need for researchers with organizational expertise.
Does this mean that sociologist have a say in factors such as insurance and what qualifies under health care?
The impact of modern psychiatry. The development of the field of psychiatry led to increased interest in the psychosociological basis for many diseases and illnesses and in the importance of effective interaction between patients and practitioners.
Social sciences are being recognized as sciences.
Changing patterns of disease and illness.
Sociologist study patterns scientifically!
In 1915, Alfred Grotjahn published a classic work, Soziale Pathologie, documenting the role of social factors in disease and illness and urging development of a social science framework for reducing health problems. The term social medicine was coined to refer to efforts to improve public health.
This highlights that improving public health was not just a physiological effort, but also a social one.
etiology of disease,
Etiology is the cause of a disease.
We see how people’s social locations within various systems of social stratification (e.g., age, race, class, occupation) left some groups more susceptible to infection and death, while offering others significantly greater protection, thus contributing to the uneven social distribution of disease and death.
This is important to highlight that social factors play a crucial role in illness as well, which makes certain institutions or groups more susceptible to illness and disease.
Mary’s is a case of vaccine hesitancy, and sociologists would look beyond her individual beliefs to understand how those beliefs are socially patterned and socially produced. For example, research supports the idea that persons who believe COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe are less likely to get vaccinated. But research also indicates that such beliefs are not random
This follows a pattern of not coming from a judgmental perspective but rather studying patterns in a scientific way.
However, sociology attempts to underst and these behaviors and experiences by placing them in their larger social context—that is, by looking for social patterns and examining the influence of the social forces impacting individual behavior and experience.
The difference between sociology and psychology. This is a part of using the sociological imagination.
human behavior and experience is shaped by the groups, organizations, and institutions to which people belong.
Personal troubles vs public issues.
It is the discipline with primary responsibility for studying social interaction among people, groups and organizations, and social institutions, and examining how these interactions influence and are influenced by the larger culture and social structure of society.
Sociological imagination?
These are still open-ended questions, and sociologists will play an important role in answering them in the years to come.
Do Sociologist have any role in determining anything in regards insurance or healthcare? What should be covered based on how much or society is effected by the certain issues?
overburdened health care system or when persons do not seek emergency care for other issues due to fear of infection). The WHO estimates over 15 million excess deaths globally from the pandemic in its first two years
The lack of ventilators, space, and amount of healthcare professionals was something I read about during the pandemic.
mistrust of vaccines; and misinformation about medical and alternative treatments, the virus, and its health consequences, led to high mortality rates (rates of death) and even higher morbidity rates (rates of disease). By the end of May 2022, over two years into the pandemic and despite the availability of effective vaccines beginning in January 2021
I am curious about the mistrust of the vaccines and when this becomes a public issue rather than a personal trouble. How did the controversy around masks and vaccines contribute to the pandemic overall?