Scientific Biomedical Framework Of Health

There is no doubt in my mind that to define and measure health in today’s society is a challenge. Over the past number of centuries, or even decades, the idea of what health is has developed, and still to this day, varies across the many socio-economic levels within a country, varying on an even broader spectrum globally. In 2013 the World Health Organisation defined health as “A state of physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. This aspect of wellness regarding ones mental health is a relatively new concept to be introduced, further showing that how we perceive health is an ever changing continuum, as opposed to an unvarying definition. In contrast to health, Baldwin, J et al. (2015) put

The more traditional framework that would have been used would have been the scientific biomedical framework. This framework is a model that does not take into consideration the psychological and social factors which may be contributing to a person’s illness; the illness is simply seen in biological terms. This ideology is far outdated, and one can see this simply by reading the WHO’s most recent definition of health, mentioned in the opening of this paper. This model views medications as the resolution to all illnesses, however we know that in today’s society, medications can often cause further problems- for example the creation of superbugs such as MRSA in the hospital system, bugs that as a result of overexposure to antibiotics have now become immune to the medication’s effects, and can therefore be detrimental to a patient’s health. By choosing to concentrate merely on biological impacts on health, a vast array of other factors, such as the environment, the money invested in public health care systems and many more, are ignored. However, in today’s contemporary society there are new frameworks to consider that challenge the traditional framework in many ways, but also contribute to the complexity of defining health. One such framework is the socio-medical model of health. This model takes many factors in account when discussing ones health, and accepts that disease can be multi-causal. I mentioned earlier that people are taking responsibility for their own health, and although this remains true, some factors which may contribute to disease are out of our control- for example certain toxins that we may be exposed to in our environment, Chernobyl being an example of a catastrophic nuclear disaster impacting on the health of people in the surrounding area for generations. Socio-economic factors also have an enormous effect on a person’s