Medical sociology
[1] The field commonly interacts with the sociology of knowledge, science and technology studies, and social epistemology.
Medical sociologists are also interested in the qualitative experiences of patients, doctors, and medical education; often working at the boundaries of public health, social work, demography and gerontology to explore phenomena at the intersection of the social and clinical sciences.
Health disparities commonly relate to typical categories such as class, race, ethnicity, immigration, gender, sexuality, and age.
Parsons is one of the founding fathers of medical sociology, and applied social role theory to interactional relations between sick people and others.
Later other sociologists such as Eliot Freidson have taken a conflict theory perspective, looking at how the medical profession secures its own interests.
[2]: 291 Key contributors to medical sociology since the 1950s include Howard S. Becker, Mike Bury, Peter Conrad, Jack Douglas, Eliot Freidson, David Silverman, Phil Strong, Bernice Pescosolido, Carl May, Anne Rogers, Anselm Strauss, Renee Fox, and Joseph W. Schneider.
The field of medical sociology is usually taught as part of a wider sociology, clinical psychology or health studies degree course, or on dedicated master's degree courses where it is sometimes combined with the study of medical ethics and bioethics.
He cites the 1842 publication of the sanitary conditions of the labouring population of Great Britain as a good example of such research.
He argues that the 1865 creation of the American Social Science Association (ASSA) was a key event in this development.
[4]: 183 Harry Stack Sullivan was a psychiatrist who investigated the treatment of schizophrenia using approaches of interpersonal psychotherapy working with sociologists and social scientists including Lawrence K. Frank, W. I. Thomas, Ruth Benedict, Harold Lasswell and Edward Sapir.
[4]: 76 Bloom argues that Sullivans work, and its focus on putative interpersonal causes and treatment of schizophrenia influenced ethnographic study of the hospital setting.
Talcott Parsons looked at the profession from a functionalist perspective, focusing on medics roles as experts, their altruism, and how they support communities.
Other sociologists have taken a conflict theory perspective, looking at how the medical profession secures its own interests.
Other scholars who studied the field include Howard S. Becker, with his publication Boys in White.
[5]: 16 The concept was introduced by Philip W. Jackson in his book Life in the Classroom, but developed further by Benson Snyder.
[5]: 17 Writing the 1970s, Eliot Freidson argued that medicine had reached a point of "professional dominance" over the content of their work, other health professions and their clients by convincing the public of medicine's effectiveness, gaining a legal monopoly over their work, and appropriating other "medical" knowledge through control of training.
[6]: 434 Coburn argues that academic interest in medical dominance has decreased over time due to the increased role of capitalism in healthcare in the US,[6]: 436 challenges to the control of health policy by politicians, economists and planners, and increased agency of patients through access to the internet.
[9]: 153 The study of the social construction of illness within medical sociology can be traced to Talcott Parsons' notion of the sick role.
[10]: 212 Parsons argues that defining properties are that the sick person is exempt from normal social roles, that they are not "responsible" for their condition, that they should try to get well, and that they should seek technically competent people to help them.
[10]: 213 The concept of the sick role has been critiqued by sociologists from neo-marxist, phenomonological and social interactionist perspectives, as well as by those with anti-establishment viewpoints.
[11] Labelling theory is derived from the work of Howard S. Becker, who studied the sociology of marijuana use.
Writing in the 1970s, Eliot Freidson referred to medicine as having "professional dominance", determining its work and defining a conceptualization of the problems that are brought to it and the best solutions to them.
[12]: 161 Yeyoung Oh Nelson argues that this system of paternalism was in part undermined by organizational change in the following decades in the US whereby insurance companies, managers and the pharmaceutical industry started competing for role of conceptualizing and delivering medical services, part of the motive being cost-saving.
Many scholars believe that bioethics arose due to a perceived lack of accountability of the medical profession, the field has been broadly adopted with most US hospitals offering some form of ethical consultation.
[14]: 2 Informed consent, having its roots in bioethics, is the process by which a doctor and a patient agree to a particular intervention.
Medical sociology studies the social processes that influence and at times limit consent.
[16]: 242 Strauss feared that if medical sociology started to adopt the goals expected by medicine it risked losing its focus on analysing society.
[16]: 248 Rosenfeld argues that the study of sociology focused solely on making recommendations for medicine has limited use for theory building and its findings cease to apply in different social situations.
[18]: 97 Reid, Margaret (1976), "The Development of Medical Sociology in Britain", Discussion Papers in Social Research No 13, University of Glasgow, archived from the original on 2011-09-30, retrieved 2011-03-11Brown, Phil (2008).
