#sociology of medicine

[medsocionwheels]

Compliance, per the two main approaches to medical sociology

Sociology in medicine is research that’s of interest to medical professionals, medical educators, medical scientists— things that are important to medicine as an institution.

Sociology of medicine tends to be research of interest to the general scientific field of sociology, not only sociologists who study matters of medicine, health, illness, healthcare, and disability. Importantly, it is not that medicine is simply disinterested in sociology of medicine, the institution of medicine sometimes has a vested interest in silencing or arguing against sociology of medicine. Sociology of medicine may not be useful to medical professionals, but if, for example, sociology of medicine is critiquing medical practice, as is often the case, it might move beyond useless to being perceived as offensive.

To further explore the difference between sociology in versus of medicine, let’s take the issue of compliance.

From the medical perspective, patient compliance is vital for successful medical practice and treatment. if your patient is not listening to you–for example, if they’re not taking their medication, and that medication is supposed to get them better, than you are going to have a much more difficult time treating that patient, and thus, a much harder time doing your job, than if the patient “complied” with your treatment plan. Same thing if your patient won’t have surgery. Well, if operating is the way that you do your job and the patient refuses, you cannot do your job as well. So, sociology in medicine would examine compliance with this medical perspective in mind. Sociology in medicine might investigate the barriers to patient compliance, and they might ask about these barriers in terms of patient behavior, asking something like "why are these patients non-compliant?" with the goal of identifying things that can be addressed to help patients better comply, so that medical professionals can have better chances of success when trying to do their jobs.

Now, moving to sociology of medicine—the greater field of sociology is interested in issues of power and inequality. When examining compliance in terms of power and inequality, we might look at something like physician control over patients, which would contribute to areas of sociology beyond medical sociology, such as the larger sociological literature on deviance and social control.

From this perspective, physicians offer something that patients cannot obtain on their own—prescription medications, surgery, imaging…these are all things that are considered both illegal and dangerous when obtained from non-credentialed entities. This means patients must be compliant to avoid severe consequences, like physical injury, disability, or even death. Healthcare providers hold power to help people feel better when they have few, if any, safe alternatives.

Instead of looking at compliance as inherently positive or necessary, we can critique the concept, and most importantly, the continued endorsement of compliance as “positive” and “necessary” by credentialed actors in medicine. So, sociology of medicine, similarly to sociology in medicine, may examine barriers to compliance, but because it does not assume compliance is necessary or helpful to the patient, it leaves room to explore the patient experience. Sociology of medicine can explore things like mistrust of medical professionals, experiences with bias and discrimination in the clinical encounter, and the patient’s understanding of a potential treatment as helpful versus their belief that the treatment is useless (independent of the science on said treatment’s effectiveness).

So, while sociology in medicine and sociology of medicine might both be interested in the question of “why do patients become noncompliant,” sociology in medicine might approach that question with the intent of identifying something that will lead to increased compliance, whereas sociology of medicine may approach the question in terms of medical harm, so not taking the assumption that compliance is positive, instead, taking the more skeptical view that compliance might be an exercise of power on the part of the healthcare provider over the patient and focusing on issues like the potential for patterns of exploitation and/or harm of certain groups of patients with shared characteristics. Sociology of medicine might ask whether healthcare providers, because they are powerful, are inherently good or right. Sociology in medicine would probably not ask this question at all, instead assuming the answer to be "yes"

[queercripintersex]

Getting the back to "why are schizophrenic seen as dangerous when they're not?"

A lot of the answer is anti-black racism and how eugenics shaped modern medicine.

Here's an accessible intro from Psychology Today, TLDR: schizophrenia was seen as a kind of dementia back when it was associated with white people. When eugenicists then started associating schizophrenia with Black people, it then became seen as dangerous and making somebody more "primitive".

For a more detailed academic source: Keval, H. (2019). Race, gender, and psychosis. Women and the Psychosocial Construction of Madness. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 9-30.

In other cultures the view of schizophrenia as non-dangerous has persisted - like this Atlantic article on schizophrenia in Ghana and India about how there the voices are more commonly understood as being comforting.

isn't it insane though how schizophrenic people are viewed as violent and dangerous by the majority of society when in reality schizophrenic people are nearly 14 times more likely to be on the receiving end of violence than to be the perpetrators...

[bicripple]

One of the very few silver linings of winding up with long covid has been experiencing medical care from cardiology.

I have a long history of issues treated by neurology, gastroenterology, and psychiatry. These are fields of medicine that only sorta kinda know what they're doing. Migraines? Only sorta understood. IBS? Even less. Depression? Hahaha yeah right.

And now I'm getting care from cardiology, a medical field that has been built around caring middle-aged men. And holy shit it is a different experience.

There are reliable, valid, and non-invasive ways to measure what's going on with me. Every 3-6 months I get an ECG, an echo, a stand test, and a blood panel to monitor inflammation.

My diagnoses are based on actual measurement, not a doctor's vibes. Treatments have been developed with actual understanding of the relevant etiologies. The drugs I take have actual, measurable impact on the outcome variables of interest. There is clear, measurable improvement of my condition over time. Even though my recovery is going very slowly, I can actually see things are going in the right direction.

Meanwhile my meetings with neurology/psychiatry/GI continue to at best take the approach of "let's throw things at the wall and see what sticks and if you notice it actually helping you". Rheumatology gave up on even trying to help me. Imagine what those fields could do if they had the same level of funding, prestige and scrutiny that medical fields that middle-aged white men care about get.

[o2studies]

Calling all science students and enthusiasts!!

I would absolutely love to have a science-revolving passion project and I’ve narrowed it down to a blog/blog-type-website. I love learning about science but so rarely take the time to actually research the things that interest me. With being a high school student, exams and life this is quite a big task to handle for 1 person and I’d love others to contribute to this!

This is by no means a set plan yet, I’m just sharing a rough idea, so if you could please interact with this post or dm me if you would be interested in something of this kind. Even if you see this 5 months after this was posted (and hopefully a working project or at least WIP) still reach out if you’re interested.

You don’t have to be a great writer for this either nor fascinated about each and every science. My favourite is chemistry, but it would be nice if this project could incorporate the 3 main branches of science: biology, chemistry and physics. It depends on if people would be interested in reading something like this or participating in, and their preferred subjects. You could write about astronomy as a whole, or go into chemistry and analysing electronic configuration, talking about your favourite dinosaur bones in palaeontology, a passive behaviour analysis in psychology, or explaining how exactly scabs work in biology. These would probably be short to mid-length entries and 1/2 times a month.

But this is just my idea and how far I’ve gone with it, feedback is appreciated, there will be more updates to come (not too many until afer my exams in May tho), and I appreciate any reblogs to share this idea with others!

Hopefully a couple people would like to help out in this project and please ask questions if you have any (as a dm or ask) ^^

[quotesfrommyreading]

The last needle to be applied against smallpox, before its eradication almost half a century ago, carried a dose of vaccine smaller than a child’s pupil. Four hundred years fit inside that droplet. The devotion of D. A. Henderson’s disease-eradicating team was in it. So were the contributions of Benjamin Rubin and the Spanish boys, as well as the advocacy of Henry Cline and the discovery by Edward Jenner, and before him the evangelism of Lady Montagu, and the influence of Circassian traders from the Caucasus Mountains, who first brought the practice of inoculation to the Ottoman court. An assembly line of discovery, invention, deployment, and trust wound its way through centuries and landed at the tip of a needle. Perhaps there is our final lesson, the one most worth carrying forward. It takes one hero to make a great story, but progress is the story of us all.

  —  Why the Age of American Progress Ended

[poebrey]

saw that there was a video on tiktok circulating about what people even do with womens studies degrees and I saw a nice little rebuttal video that gave a syllabus list and that’s really nice and informative and all but back to the point there are real jobs that are super important that people can do with humanities degrees and part of fighting the backlash against them is acknowledging they exist

[mishkakagehishka]

Throwback to like three or four years ago when was it when i was on here ranting about how history must be taught better specifically because life is just one big corkboard conspiracy theory except neither conspiracy nor theory, everything is just influenced by everything that happened before and you can't learn about anything without learning about everything that happened before that first. Etc etc.

[feralbnuuy]

also if youre gonna weigh in on renewability and ecosystem resoration/protection i feel like you should probably listen to the people who like. idk WORK IN THAT FIELD??? HAVE DEGREES IN IT??? not to appeal to authority but this is my life’s work, anyone who has ever had the (dis)pleasure of interacting with me drunk is gonna hear me wax poetic about wetlands and dive into in-depth talks about wetland hydrology because im a FREAK LIKE THAT

[hjellacott]

"Inclusivity" is not what people claim it is (for their own personal gain)

Lately I'm hearing a lot about inclusivity because people claim that is a good reason for the term "women" or "woman" to disappear from medical pages about female-only health things (while ironically the same thing does NOT happen to men stuff) in favour of being more "inclusive" and "including" trans people. I'm also hearing this a lot in classrooms (I was a teacher and many of my friends still are) when it comes to the inclusivity of people with learning difficulties in normal schools that aren't adapted for learning difficulties. So I thought I'd get some heads out of arses by reminding everyone that is NOT inclusivity.

Let's start by analysing this definition carefully, coming from Cambridge:

Inclusivity is the fact (as in, a thing that is done) of including (grouping together) all types of people (regardless of colour, sex, nationality, sexual orientation, age and so on), things or ideas and treating them all fairly (with fairness) and equally (in the same manner).

Obviously, in real life it gets applied a bit differently, and with limits. We include both girls and boys in a party, but perhaps we set an age limit, we include people with learning difficulties in a classroom where other kids don't have learning difficulties, but we limit the seriousness of those difficulties, and so on. Still, as a general idea, in our society:

Inclusivity is putting both boys and girls in the same classroom, with the same teacher, learning the same things at the same time and treating them equally.

Inclusivity is including (hence the word) LGB under the umbrella of same-sex attraction, as opposed to just saying "gay" and forgetting the rest.

Inclusivity is using the term POC as opposed to simply "black" to include all kinds of people of colour, regardless of whether their actual tone of skin is pitch dark, or whether they're of African descent or another.

Inclusivity is including disabled people into your place of work and helping them to be able to do the same work as their peers.

Let's now pause to think about the part of "treating them all fairly and equally". Notice that "fairly" is put first and given precedence. This is to stress the fact that fairness goes first, and equally refers more to the fact that the fair treatment should put everyone in an equal level of advantage or disadvantage, without giving anyone extra privileges.

Example 1: You've got several children of different heights trying to see over a tall fence. Treating them just equally would mean giving them all the same stool to climb on to look over the fence, even if some kids are already tall enough to see without help, and others might need an extra tall stool. It'd be equal but it wouldn't be fair. But treating them fairly first and equally second means analysing their individual difficulties and giving them each a taller or shorter stool so that in the end their heads are all at equal height over the fence. That way the children end up being treated fairly and being in equal conditions.

Example 2: You bring children with learning difficulties into a school that is not equipped to deal properly with learning difficulties, and where all of the classmates don't have learning difficulties and the teachers aren't trained for them. Sure, it might seem there's inclusivity, because all of the kids are going to the same school regardless of sex, problems, conditions, age, and so on, right? But it isn't, because it isn't fair to the kids with learning difficulties, who will have to reach the same level as their peers without the extra help they need. In this case, they'll also be treated equally, but once again, not fairly. For inclusivity to be done right, you can't forget the fairness, therefore the kids with learning difficulties should be having some accommodations made for them, so that they can be at equal level with their peers, in a fair situation.

Inclusivity is frequently done wrong in schools, hospitals, prisons and all over the world because the principle of fairness gets constantly forgotten, so that we give stools to people who don't need them just because everyone must have one, if you see my point.

Now, ideologies aside, you can't claim inclusivity to remove women's only spaces. A previously "women's only" prison, locker room, bathroom, etc., gets turned into an "everybody" place just for the comfort of trans people, and there is no inclusivity there because it's not fair to anyone and it's not equal to anyone. Think about it. Before each got to have a place of their own, now nobody does, and the reason why there was a division for sex in the first place, which was safety, gets forgotten. Therefore not only there is no fairness and equality and everyone loses a privilege and is forced to be crammed together, but also, it's a total disrespect and slap on the face to for instance victims of sexual assault, whose valid concerns are being disrespected and ignored, and who are being forced to share intimate spaces with people that look like their aggressors, putting them in situations that can be heavily triggering and harmful for their mental health, unfairly.

Why should some people's feelings of safety, fear, concerns, be more valid than others? That's not fair. You want inclusivity? Give them all a private space they don't have to share, where they can all feel safe.

Similarly, there is no inclusivity in removing the term women so that trans women feel better, specially not in medical websites where the term "women" (or its singular, woman) is absolutely essential because all kinds of medical issues, from cancer to heart attacks, can look extremely differently depending solely on biological sex. Because guess what? your health and your body don't give two shits about your gender identity. Neither do medical issues. You can tell yourself you're a woman all you want, but if you were born a boy you won't ever fear cervical cancer, you'll fear prostate cancer, and a heart attack will look different in you than in biological women. And biology cannot be changed no matter how many surgeries you undergo and how many medicines you take. Keeping the terms women and men in medicine and other scientific contexts, to put this example, is for everyone's safety, including yours. And it's inclusive to keep it and exclusive to remove it. Yes, you hear it right, what you've called inclusivity, is actually exclusing half the world's population (women).

And when you hesitate, think about LGBTQ+. Why do we have so many letters? Because inclusivity. The same way you wouldn't want your repressentative letter to disappear from that, because it'd make you invisible, women don't want their noun to disappear from places, because it makes us invisible. And women have historically been invisible long enough.

[medsocionwheels]

Medical Sociology 101: What is medical sociology, and how is it distinct from other approaches to studying medicine, health, illness, disability, and healthcare?

Medical sociology is both a social science and a health science—it is one of the social scientific approaches to studying topics in health science. So, how is the sociological approach to studying topics in medicine, health, illness, and disability, distinct from other approaches to examining these topics?

Medical sociologists study health, illness, and healthcare, in terms of social problems and social factors. They are not looking at individual issues, nor are they interested in biological or cognitive factors independent of social factors.

Now, it’s important to note that social problems do, in fact, impact individuals, but sociologists aren’t interested in this impact to the individual as much as they’re interested in the shared impacts of social problems across groups of individuals. 

So, sociology is not always useful for understanding personal experience; however, sociological research can give insight as to whether your experience is similar to experiences of other people with shared characteristics. instead of asking something like, “why does this individual patient have this experience” the medical sociologist might instead ask, “are there characteristics shared by many patients with this experience which may predispose an individual to have said experience?” So, here, not asking why this individual patient has the experience, but why does this group of patients have this experience while another group does not.

Medical sociology demonstrates that things like likelihood of health or illness, experiences and perceptions of medicine, health, illness, and disability, who provides health care, how healthcare is provided, and to whom it is provided, and institutional aspects of the healthcare system itself, are not random, but instead, are shaped by social factors. Medical problems become social problems when they are shared by many individuals with some similar characteristic, experience, or circumstance.

Watch Here:

Originally posted on wordpress:

[petnews2day]

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[quotesfrommyreading]

In some ways disease does not exist until we agree that it does–by perceiving, naming, and responding to it.

  —  Disease in history: frames and framers (Charles E. Rosenberg, 1989)

[autumnoakes]

i will never understand the media's opinion of academics as dry and boring.

[jkl-fff]

Nature loves diversity. Society hates it.

Pour one out for a real one.

[spaghetti-n00dles]

sometimes you feel like you have a good understanding of discourse and then you take a introductory sociology class and it’s Oh. i Get It now.

[ammg-old2]

Recently, while seeing a patient in an intensive-care unit at my hospital, I stopped to talk with the critical-care physician on duty, someone I’d known since college. “I’m running a warehouse for the dying,” she said bleakly. Out of the ten patients in her unit, she said, only two were likely to leave the hospital for any length of time. More typical was an almost eighty-year-old woman at the end of her life, with irreversible congestive heart failure, who was in the I.C.U. for the second time in three weeks, drugged to oblivion and tubed in most natural orifices and a few artificial ones. Or the seventy-year-old with a cancer that had metastasized to her lungs and bone, and a fungal pneumonia that arises only in the final phase of the illness. She had chosen to forgo treatment, but her oncologist pushed her to change her mind, and she was put on a ventilator and antibiotics. Another woman, in her eighties, with end-stage respiratory and kidney failure, had been in the unit for two weeks. Her husband had died after a long illness, with a feeding tube and a tracheotomy, and she had mentioned that she didn’t want to die that way. But her children couldn’t let her go, and asked to proceed with the placement of various devices: a permanent tracheotomy, a feeding tube, and a dialysis catheter. So now she just lay there tethered to her pumps, drifting in and out of consciousness.

Almost all these patients had known, for some time, that they had a terminal condition. Yet they—along with their families and doctors—were unprepared for the final stage. “We are having more conversation now about what patients want for the end of their life, by far, than they have had in all their lives to this point,” my friend said. “The problem is that’s way too late.” In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one’s final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or “It’s O.K.” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.”

People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives.