Sociological Perspectives On Health And Social Care

Illness can be defined as a state of suffering due to the presence of a disease, this term can be used to describe a patient’s personal experience of a disease. This definition is a modern concept which is based on the scientific approach of illness as a biological or mental abnormality with a cause, train of symptoms and a treatment method. While in primitive societies illness was seen as an evil spirit that attacked people and caused them pain or death, this primitive concept of illness was as a result of superstitious beliefs and lack of scientific development. During the middle ages the concept of illness was influenced heavily by religious beliefs and illness was seen as punishment for sins. The way each society defined illness was

This concept of illness as a social state focuses on the behaviour and expectations of the society toward the sick, how the society reacts to those who are ill and what is expected of the sick person by the society. Sociologists viewed illness as deviant behaviour and this illness as deviance perspective was formulated initially by Talcott Parsons (1951) in his sick role theory, which will be discussed further in the course of this material, Parsons argued that illness is a form of deviance that disturbs the social function of a society. He described being sick as a disruption in the normal state of the human being both biologically and socially and not just biologically as was the case with previous sociological studies of health and illness that relied solely on the medical perspective with little effort to correlate biological factors with social factors. The biological view of illness as deviance from the biological norm of health and feelings of well-being emphasizing only on the physiological reality of the individual neglects any social reality that a person can be said to be sick when he or she acts

Social judgements are influenced by different factors of social change, norms and what is considered normal today might be considered deviant in future and vice versa, for example homosexuality which was generally considered a deviant behaviour in the past is becoming widely accepted in many parts of the world and people who frown at homosexuality and consider it deviant are labelled homophobic. In the case of illness as deviance, in the past illness occurred in small groups and was considered a common occurrence, however due to geometric changes in the world today as a result of technology, evolution of medical techniques and changing theories in disease treatment has drawn disease out of the expectable into a more specialized context. The methods for dealing with the sick has changed, the sick are often transferred to the care of specialists who don’t operate within the context of the familiar and over whom ordinary people have few powers of control, this transfer and our submission to medical procedures and hospital routines creates circumstances that lead to the definition of sickness as deviance. functionalists argue that a