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Concept
Social medicine
Summary
The field of social medicine seeks to implement social care through
understanding how social and economic conditions impact health, disease and the practice of medicine and
fostering conditions in which this understanding can lead to a healthier society.
Social medicine as a scientific field gradually began in the early 19th century, the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent increase in poverty and disease among workers raised concerns about the effect of social processes on the health of the poor. The field of social medicine is most commonly addressed today by public health efforts to understand what are known as social determinants of health.
The major emphasis on biomedical science in medical education, health care, and medical research has resulted into a gap with our understanding and acknowledgement of far more important social determinants of public health and individual disease: social-economic inequalities, war, illiteracy, detrimental life-styles (smoking, obesity), discrimination because of race, gender and religion. Farmer et al. (2006) gave the following explanation for this gap:
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 traditionally takes a different look at issues of impairment and disability by adopting a holistic perspective on health. The social model was developed as a direct response to the medical model, the social model sees barriers (physical, attitudinal and behavioural) not just as a biomedical issue, but as caused in part by the society we live in – as a product of the physical, organizational and social worlds that lead to discrimination (Oliver 1996; French 1993; Oliver and Barnes 1993).
Official source
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