Social medicine
Social medicine is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on the profound interplay between socio-economic factors and individual health outcomes. Rooted in the challenges of the Industrial Revolution, it seeks to:
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 efforts to understand what are known as social determinants of health.[1]
Social care[edit]
Social care aims to promote wellness and emphasizes preventive, ameliorative, and maintenance efforts during illness, impairment, or disability. It adopts a holistic perspective on health and encompasses a variety of practices and viewpoints aimed at disease prevention and reduction of the economic, social, and psychological burdens associated with prolonged illnesses and diseases.[4] 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). Social care advocates equality of opportunities for vulnerable sections of society.[5]
History[edit]
German physician Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) laid foundations for this model. Other prominent figures in the history of social medicine, beginning from the 20th century, include Salvador Allende, Henry E. Sigerist, Thomas McKeown,[6] Victor W. Sidel,[7] Howard Waitzkin, and more recently Paul Farmer[8] and Jim Yong Kim.
In The Second Sickness, Waitzkin traces the history of social medicine from Engels, through Virchow and Allende.[9] Waitzkin has sought to educate North Americans about the contributions of Latin American Social Medicine.[10][11]
In 1976, the British public health scientist and health care critic Thomas McKeown, MD, published "The role of medicine: Dream, mirage or nemesis?", wherein he summarized facts and arguments that supported what became known as McKeown's thesis, i.e. that the growth of population can be attributed to a decline in mortality from infectious diseases, primarily thanks to better nutrition, later also to better hygiene, and only marginally and late to medical interventions such as antibiotics and vaccines.[12] McKeown was heavily criticized for his controversial ideas, but is nowadays remembered as "the founder of social medicine".[13]