BASIC TERMS of Determents of Health related with Sociology and Social Anthropology

1. Determents of Health
Dr. C. SENTHILKUMAR
Assistant Professor,
Dept of Sociology and Social Work
Arsi University, Ethiopia

2. Chapter - I

3. • DEFINITIONS OF BASIC TERMS
In basic terms, sociology is the scientific study
of human societies. In other words, its subject
matter is both human behavior and most
importantly, human relationships. Sociology is
the study of social world. It involves studying
human beings and their patterns of behavior.

4. • In order to do this, we focus on the way people
form relationships and how these relationships,
considered in their totality, are represented by the
concept of a "society".
• In this respect, the focus of the sociologist's
attention is group behavior. That is, the effect that
the groups people join or are born into (family,
work, education and so forth) have upon people's
social behavior.

5. • The first social scientist to use the term sociology
was a Frenchman by the name of Auguste Comte
who lived from 1798-1857. As coined by Comte,
the term sociology is a combination of two
words. The first part of the term is a Latin, socius-
that may variously mean society, association,
togetherness. The other word, logos, is of Greek
origin. It literally means to speak about or word.

6. • What is Anthropology?
• Anthropology is the systematic study of
humanity, with the goal of understanding our
evolutionary origins, our distinctiveness as a
species, and the great diversity in our forms of
social existence across the world and through
time. The focus of Anthropology is on
understanding both our shared humanity and
diversity, and engaging with diverse ways of
being in the world.
• Anthropology is divided into Four subfields:
sociocultural, biological, archaeology and
Linguistic.

7. • SOCIOCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
• Sociocultural anthropologists interpret the content of
particular cultures, explain variation among cultures,
and study processes of cultural change and social
transformation. UC Davis sociocultural
anthropologists conduct research on most areas of
the world, focusing on topics that include: human
ecology; gender relations; culture and ideology;
demography and family systems; race, class and
gender inequality; resistance movements;
colonialism, neocolonialism, and development; and
cultural politics in the West.

8. • BIOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
• Biological anthropologists study a variety of
aspects of human evolutionary biology. Some
examine fossils and apply their observations
to understanding human evolution; others
compare morphological, biochemical genetic,
and physiological adaptations of living humans
to their environments; still others observe
behavior of human and nonhuman primates
(monkeys and apes) to understand the roots
of human behavior.

9. • ARCHAEOLOGY
• Archaeologists study the material remains of present
and past cultural systems to understand the
technical, social and political organization of those
systems and the larger culture cultural evolutionary
process that stand behind them. The UC Davis
program in archaeology emphasizes research in
California and the Great Basin, but also supports the
study of hunter-gatherer systems in general, and is
engaged in such research in Australia Alaska, Peru,
Greenland, Western Europe, North and South Africa,
and northern Asia.

10. • Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic anthropologists study the many ways
people communicate across the globe. They are
interested in how language is linked to how we see
the world and how we relate to each other. This can
mean looking at how language works in all its
different forms, and how it changes over time. For
linguistic anthropologists, language and
communication are keys to how we make society and
culture.

11. Medical Sociology
• How do you define health?
• Why sociology deals about health?
• What is the relationship between Culture &
Health?
• Do you believe that diseases are just a part of
nature or biology or socially produced and
distributed?

12. Introduction
• Medical sociology is the systematic study of
how humans manage issues of health care for
both the sick and the healthy.
• Medical sociology is concerned with the social
causes and consequences of health and
illness.

13. • Medical sociology brings sociological
perspectives, theories, and methods to the
study of health, illness, and medical practice.
Major areas of investigation include the social
facts of health and disease, the social
behavior of health care personnel and their
clients.

14. The subject matter of medical
sociology
The social facts of health and disease,
 The social behavior of health care personnel
and their clients,
 The social functions of health organizations
and institutions,
 The social patterns of health services,
The relationship of health care delivery
systems to other systems such as the economy
and politics.

15. Cont’d
• The social construction of health is a major
focus within medical sociology. Doctor-patient
relationship, the stracture health care system,
the impact culture
• Many of the greatest threats to an individual's
health and physical well-being stem largely
from unhealthy lifestyles and high-risk
behavior.
• For example, heart disease, cancer, AIDS, and
a host of modern health problems.

16. Definition of health
1. Lay Point of Views: doing activities with no
apparent symptoms of disease. (functional
fitness)
2. Professional Points of View
• World Health Organisation (WHO) “Health is a
state of complete physical, mental, and social
well-being and not merely the absence of
disease or infirmity.”

17. Cont’d
• McKeown supports the WHO definition and
stated that medicine's task is not to create
happiness, but to remove a major source of
unhappiness disease and disability from
people's lives.

18. Types of health
• Physical health- is concerned with anatomical
integrity and physiological functioning of the
body.
• Mental Health- is the ability to learn and think
clearly and coherently.
• Social health- is the ability to make and
maintain acceptable interaction with other
people.

19. • Emotional health - is the ability of expressing
emotions in the appropriate way.
• Spiritual Health - Some people relate health
with religion.

20. CONTRASTING IDEAS ABOUT
HEALTH AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR
• Primitive society :
• Dubos (1969) suggested that primitive humans were
closer to the animals in that they, too relied upon
their instincts to stay healthy. Primitive medicines
made from Plants, vegetables and animals were
invariably used in combination with some form of
ritual to expel the harmful spirit from a diseased
body.

21. • During the Neolithic age:- Some 4,000 to
5,000 years ago, people living in what is today
the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa,
are known to have even engaged in a surgical
procedure called trepanation or trephining,
which consists of a hole being bored in the
skull in order to liberate the evil spirit
supposedly contained in a person's head.

22. Middle Ages: – The illness is punishment for sins
and caring for the sick is seen as religious charity
Modern concept: – The illness is based on scientific
view of biological pathology or mental abnormality
-with cause, symptoms and prescribed treatment.
Modern medicine traces its birth to Western
Europe in the late eighteenth century.

23. • Michel Foucault (1973) noted the emergence
of two distinct trends in medical practice-what
he called "medicine of the species" and
"medicine of social spaces”.
• Medicine of the Species: focuses on classify-
ing diseases, diagnosing and treating patients,
and finding cures. Medical gaze started.
• Medicine of Social Spaces: was concerned not
with curing diseases, but preventing them.

24. The Germ Theory of Disease
• Most physicians in the 1800s were primarily
interested in treating patients and improving
the state of medical technology. They were
not necessarily concerned with social reform.
However, the medical doctors of the time had
a history of only mixed success in curing
human aliments.

25. • British social historian Roy Porter (1897)
reported "the latter part of the nineteenth
century brought one of medicine's true
revolutions “Bacteriology”. Louis Pasteur,
Robert Koch, and others in bacteriological
research, decisively confirmed the germ
theory of disease and uncovered the cause of
a host of diseases, including typhoid, tetanus,
and diphtheria, along with the vaccines
providing immunity.

26. • The tremendous progress in the development
of internal medicine, anesthesiology,
pathology, immunology, and surgical
techniques, convinced physicians to focus
exclusively upon a clinical medicine grounded
in exact scientific laboratory procedures.

27. • Thus, the practice of medicine in the
twentieth century rested solidly upon the
premise that every disease had a specific
pathogenic cause, the treatment of which
could best be accomplished by removing or
controlling that cause within a biomedical
framework.

28. • The research in microbiology, biochemistry,
and related fields resulted in the discovery
and production of a large variety of drugs and
drug-based techniques for successfully
treating many diseases, this approach became
medicine's primary method for dealing with
the problems it was called upon to treat.

29. • Return to the "Whole Person"
• By the late 1960s, polio and smallpox were
largely eradicated and infectious diseases had
been severely curtailed in most regions of the
world. This situation produced a major change
in the pattern of diseases, with chronic
illnesses-which by definition are long-term
and incurable-replacing infectious diseases as
the major threats to health.

30. • This "epidemiological transition" occurred
initially in industrialized nations and then
spread throughout the world. It is
characterized by the emergence of chronic
diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and
stroke as the leading causes of death.

31. • However, within a few decades, coronary
heart disease had become the leading cause
of death in Western society with the aging of
the population. New diagnostic techniques,
drugs, and surgical procedures, including
heart transplants, by-pass surgery, and
angioplasty, were developed.

32. Allopathy

33. Homeopathy / Unani

34. Ayurveda

35. Siddha

36. Acupunture

37. Yoga

38. Varmakalai

39. Psychiatrist

40. Role of Medical Sociology and
Anthropology in Public Health and
Health System Development

41. • Role of Medical Sociology in Public Health
• The medical sociology helps to identify and
study social groups in their activities of
maintaining and preserving health,
alleviating or curing diseases. The social
group is a social system whose components
are interdependent.

42. • Medical sociology is concerned with the social
facets of health and illness, social function of
health institutions and organizations, the
relationship of health care delivery to other
social systems and social behavior of health
personnel and consumers of health care. In
brief, it's the study of relationships between
health phenomena and social factors. Thus, in
medical sociology health, illness and medical
care are studied from sociological
perspectives.

43. • The units of analysis in medical sociology are;
the smallest social unit of relationships
between doctor and patient, doctor and nurse
and others, organizational unit includes
hospitals, medical associations etc., social
status which refers to occupational categories
like doctor, nurse etc. and community and
society where neighborhood health centre,
public health centre and accessibility of
primary health care can be studied.

44. • Every society has its own definition of health,
illness and disease. The medical sociology
helps in understanding distribution and
aetiology of disease in the society, the social
and cultural perspective on disease, roles and
attitude towards treatment. Medical sociology
contributes to social aspects of medicine, for
e.g. social factors involved in illness, the
behavior of patients, medical professionals
and other health workers as well as different
types of medical organizations.

45. Role of Medical Sociology in Public
Health

46. • Thus, in short medical sociology covers the
following aspects of public health:
i. Social determinants and distribution of
disease
ii. It studies the medical organizations in
structural and functional manner.

47. iii. It also studies the social environment of
medicine and helps to design the curricula of
trainings for health personnel.
iv. It also studies the relationship between
health provider and consumer, and thus decides
the preference of consumer for a particular type
of service as well as compliance of the consumer
to the physician's advice.

48. • Role of Medical Anthropology in Public
Health
• Medical anthropology is the cross cultural study of
medical systems and the study of bio-ecological and
socio-cultural factors that influence the incidence of
health and disease now and throughout human
history. The areas where the medical anthropologists
do research are human evolution, anatomy,
paediatrics, epidemiology, mental health, drug
abuse, definition of health and disease, training of
medical personnel, medical bureaucracies, hospital
organization and operations, the doctor patient
relationship and process of bringing scientific
medicine to users of traditional medicine.

49. • The medical anthropology can be studied as a
bi-polar process whose one pole is biological
in which one studies human growth and
development, role of disease in human
evolution and study of disease of ancient man.
The second is sociocultural pole where one
studies traditional medical systems, illness
behaviour, doctor patient relationship,
introduction of western medicine to
traditional societies and in between this there
is epidemiology and cultural ecology.

50. Role of Medical Sociology and
Anthropology in Health System
Development

51. • Public health as seen from the eyes of
comprehensive primary health care
mentioned in Alma Ata declaration covers the
following aspects that can be analyzed from
social and anthropological perspective.

52. • i. It sees health as a process in human
development and states that it cannot be
achieved in isolation without associated socio-
economic development.
• ii. It strongly affirms that health which is the
complete state of physical, social and mental
well being and not merely the absence of
disease and infirmity is the fundamental
human right and to achieve the highest level
of health should be a world-wide social goal.

53. • iii. For health it lays emphasis on all the
aspects of health care that is, preventive,
promotive, curative and rehabilitative.
• iv. Its shape is determined by social goals like
quality of life and maximum health benefits to
the greatest number of people and advises to
attain these goals by social means like
community participation.

54. • v. It lays emphasis on essential health care
which is accessible, affordable and acceptable
by the people and with their full participation.
This health care has to be scientifically sound
and socially acceptable. It requires co-
ordinated efforts from all other related
sectors.
• vi. It is based on the economic, socio-cultural
and political conditions of a country and it
promotes equity.