What is Social Medicine? Explained
Contents
- Introduction
- Scope
- Social care
- History
Introduction
The field of social medicine seeks to implement social care through
- Gaining a better understanding of how social and economic factors influence health, disease, and medical practise, and
- Fostering conditions in which this knowledge can lead to a healthier society.
The Industrial Revolution and the resulting increase in poverty and disease among workers raised concerns about the impact of social processes on the poor's health, prompting the development of social medicine as a scientific field in the early nineteenth century. Today, public health efforts to understand what are known as social determinants of health are most commonly addressed by the field of social medicine.
Scope
The focus on biomedical science in medical education, health care, and research has created a chasm in our understanding and acceptance of far more important social determinants of public health and individual disease, such as social-economic inequalities, war, illiteracy, unhealthy lifestyles (smoking, obesity), and discrimination based on race, gender, and religion. For this discrepancy,
Farmer et al. (2006) proposed the following explanation.
The holy grail of modern medicine remains the search for a molecular basis of disease. While the practical yield of such circumscribed inquiry has been enormous, exclusive focus on molecular-level phenomena has contributed to the increasing "desocialization" of scientific inquiry: a tendency to ask only biological questions about what are in fact biosocial phenomena.
They further concluded that "Biosocial understandings of medical phenomena are urgently needed".
Social care
By taking a holistic approach to health, social care has traditionally taken a different approach to issues of impairment and disability. The social model was created as a direct response to the medical model. The social model views barriers (physical, mental, and behavioural) as a product of the physical, organisational, and social worlds that lead to discrimination, rather than just as a biomedical issue (Oliver 1996; French 1993; Oliver and Barnes 1993). Equal opportunity for the most vulnerable members of society is promoted by social care.
History
The foundations for this model were laid by German physician Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902). Salvador Allende, Henry E. Sigerist, Thomas McKeown, Victor W. Sidel, Howard Waitzkin, and, more recently, Paul Farmer and Jim Yong Kim are other notable figures in the history of social medicine dating back to the twentieth century.
Waitzkin traces the history of social medicine from Engels to Virchow to Allende in The Second Sickness. Waitzkin has worked to raise awareness of Latin American social medicine among North Americans.
Thomas McKeown, MD, a British public health scientist and health care critic, published "The Role of Medicine: Dream, Mirage, or Nemesis?" in 1976. where he summarised facts and arguments that supported what became known as McKeown's thesis, namely, that population growth can be attributed to a decline in infectious disease mortality, owing primarily to improved nutrition, later to improved hygiene, and only marginally and late to medical interventions such as antibiotics and vaccines. McKeown was chastised for his controversial ideas, but he is now known as "the father of social medicine."
Comments