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The sociology of health and illness, sociology of health and wellness, or health sociology examines the interaction between society and health. As a field of study it is interested in all aspects of life, including contemporary as well as historical influences, that impact and alter health and wellbeing. [1] [2]
Medical sociology is the sociological analysis of health, Illness, differential access to medical resources, the social organization of medicine, Health Care Delivery, the production of medical knowledge, selection of methods, the study of actions and interactions of healthcare professionals, and the social or cultural (rather than clinical or bodily) effects of medical practice. [1]
In their book Society, Culture and Health: an Introduction to Sociology for Nurses, health sociologists Karen Willis and Shandell Elmer outline eight 'features' of the biomedical model's approach to illness and health: [1]: 27–29 doctrine of specific aetiology: that all illness and disease is attributable to a specific, physiological dysfunction
[12]: 91–92 He argues that there was some convergence between the disciplines, as medical sociology started to adopt some of the methodologies of anthropology such as qualitative research and began to focus more on the patient, and medical anthropology started to focus on western medicine. He argued that more interdisciplinary communication ...
Like many other interdisciplinary fields such as sociology, phenomenology or public policy, health politics incorporates approaches and methodologies of other related fields of study such as intersectionality. [4] It examines the political nature of health and healthcare within the wider public health and medical contexts. [5] [6]
Precursory work, as seen above, had created a prototype field of research for the sociology of death to grow out from. Further work in the 1960s [3] grew into a defined interdisciplinary field from the 1990s with great outputs of research and offerings of academic courses on sociologically related issues around death. [5]
The concept of medicalization was devised by sociologists to explain how medical knowledge is applied to behaviors which are not self-evidently medical or biological. [1] The term medicalization entered the sociology literature in the 1970s in the works of Irving Zola , Peter Conrad and Thomas Szasz , among others.
Media studies – academic discipline and field of study that deals with the content, history and effects of various media; in particular, the mass media. Communication studies – an academic field that deals with processes of human communication, commonly defined as the sharing of symbols to create meaning.