Psychosocial Context of Health Essay: To What Extent Do Gender and Ethnicity Determine Our Health Outcome
Introduction
Health is something that is not often thought of until it goes wrong. There are different concepts and models which provide guidance in deducing how and why different outcomes of health occur. Understanding these can help in the prevention, control and treatment of ill health. This essay aims to investigate the extent gender and ethnicity affect and determine our health outcomes. Detailed evidence will be provided exploring the extent of the idea about how gender and ethnicity play a part in deciding health consequences. The impact of wider determinants such as psychological and social influences will also be discussed to offer alternative theories. As the topic can be very broad, there will be focus on the determinants affecting the health outcome of body image and mental health.
Defining Health and Health Outcome
It is important to define health and health outcomes
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Different ethnic groups are under different pressures and may have learnt to deal with these differently based on their social experiences. Built in policies, social inequalities and different resource available will also widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots, affecting health outcomes. Race on the other hand is often associated with genetic ancestry, and often refers to a group of people with similar physical characteristics. Both ethnicity and race can be considered social constructs as the Human Genome Project has confirmed that billions of base pairs in humans are 99.9% identical in every person. This means that individuals are only 0.1 % different from one another, but this accounts for people’s susceptibility to a particular disease. It supports the idea that there is only one race, the human