There are many views when it comes to healthcare and you hear it all over the news all the time. It is a constant debate that will probably always be an issue for the American people. In sociology, there are a few different perspectives that are given for healthcare in the United States. The first perspective is the functionalist perspective. Functionalist believe that being sick must be controlled and when people are sick, there it keeps them from doing their daily duties. They say that illness decreases social interactions and if too many people are sick at once, it would break down the society.
Illness that are deadly and wipe out a large population of people at a time are more of what the functionalists are talking about, but it can also be as simple as the flu. When the flu was a big deal a couple years ago, a lot of people were becoming sick and had to stay home from their jobs. When people are gone from work, it stops them from completing their societal responsibilities (Shaefer 358).
Functionalists believe that people take on a role no matter what is going on in one’s life. When someone is sick, they take on the societal role known as the sick role. The sociology book defines the sick role as being, “societal expectations about the attitudes and behavior of a person viewed as being ill” (Shaefer 358). People who take on the sick role are exempted from everyday life like work or family duties. In a study done by the Department of Sociology from Uppsala University, it was defined that in order for a person to be legitimately considered in the sick role for work, the person had to have clear signs of wanting to get better. The sick person must seek medical help and be fully willing to recover (Flinkfeldt 1150).
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This is the one behavior that is okay for people to skip daily responsibilities and not suffer from it. Since the United States is a more developed country, illness does not affect us as much as some of the less developed countries. For those in the developing countries, it is necessary for them to try and get better again quicker than what it would be for someone in the United States. The United States also has a larger population and can take large amounts of people getting sick before it becomes an issue of lack of workers. As for smaller developing countries, they need all the workers they can get and if they are without them, the society may become unstable rather quickly.
Another sociological perspective towards health is the conflict perspective. Conflict theorists think that the medicalization of society is increasing all the time, and medical professionals have gone above and beyond their ability to excuse a person from work or school. In a journal article written by a sociologist, they describe medicalization as, “the process by which some aspects of human life come to be considered as medical problems, whereas before they were not considered pathological” (Maturo 122). Medicalization is increasing more and more with technology because people will google their symptoms and get answers that could be totally different from what they actually have. People are starting to use more of the medical terminology from seeing it on the internet or watching TV.
Conflict theorists also talk about how medicine is a form of social control in the sense that without it, people would be getting sick all the time and could potentially decrease the population. This would result in the number of working people to become lower and further impact the society in a negative way. They also like to look at health care institutions and determine who benefits and suffers from the way they are run in the United States. In the U.S., it is known that the poor do not get as good of treatment or healthcare services as the wealthy because they tend to focus more in the areas where people have money (Schaefer 359).
The third type of perspective is the interactionist perspective. From an interactionist’s perspective, they believe that patients seek out the services of a healthcare practitioner and often do not let anything go unseen. They like to look at the personal interaction between the patient and physician or care provider. This type of perspective is often viewed from a micro-level perspective and is different from the conflict and functionalist because of it being a smaller group. With the use of technology increasing in the medical field, interactionists are focusing on the impact of less face to face contact with the care provider. The book states that face to face interaction has been cut down by one third of what it used to be before doctors used computers to scan through patient files (Schaefer 360). From the result of this lack of social interaction, those who are giving the patient information are to now read the file before talking to the patient so that they can fully relay the results and not get caught up in the screen. In the medical profession, it is important for doctors to have that interaction with the patient because it gives them reassurance that the doctor knows what he or she is talking about.
The final perspective that goes along with healthcare is the labeling perspective. The labeling theory is described as the designation of being either healthy or ill. Health care professionals have the control and power to label someone as either sick or healthy and then decide what actions to take in order to treat that person. When labeling someone as sick, it changes the way people look at us or treat us. If someone finds out they have cancer, everyone will look at them differently because they have this label attached to them. Labels that are associated with illnesses are all at the hands of the medical professionals because they are the ones who diagnose and assign their patients with the findings (Shaefer 360).
Although all these perspectives are a little bit different, they all have things in common. They all look at the way society is being impacted, whether it is in a large-scale perspective, or at the micro level. Overall, health and illness is a societal concern because everyone in the same society shares a healthcare delivery system. The impact of culture and other things go into health when looked at in a sociological perspective, so it only makes sense that every perspective is a little bit different.
Works Cited
- Flinkfeldt, Marie. ‘Wanting to work: managing the sick role in high-stake sickness insurance meetings.’ Sociology of Health & Illness, vol. 39, no. 7, 2017, pp. 1149-1165, EBSCOhost. doi:10.1111/1467-9566.12567.
- Maturo, Antonio. ‘Medicalization: Current concept and future directions in a Bionic Society.’ Mens Sana Monographs, vol. 10, no. 1, 2012, p. 122, US National Library of Medicine. doi:10.4103/0973-1229.91587.
- Schaefer, Richard T. Sociology: A Brief Introduction. 12th ed., SmartBook, McGraw-Hill Education, 2018.
