10.2 Health as a Social Problem
Kathryn Burrows and Kimberly Puttman
Even with our brief explanation of COVID-19 statistics in the introduction of this chapter, we see that people experience unequal health outcomes based on their race and ethnicity. This is just one dimension of inequality in health outcomes. What else makes health and illness a social problem? Let’s apply the characteristics of a social problem to health and illness.
Health and illness in society go beyond individual experience. We usually think of health, illness, and medicine in individual terms. When a person becomes ill, we view the illness as a medical problem with biological causes. A physician treats the individual accordingly. A sociological approach takes a different view. Unlike physicians, sociologists and other public health scholars do not try to understand why any one person becomes ill. Instead, we typically examine illness rates to explain why people from certain social backgrounds are likelier than others to become sick. Our social location in society—our social class, race and ethnicity, gender, and other dimensions of diversity—makes a critical difference.
Medical sociology is the systematic study of how societies manage issues of health and illness, such as diseases and disorders, healthcare access, and the larger picture of physical, mental, and social components of health and illness. Major topics for medical sociologists include the doctor/patient relationship, the structure and socioeconomics of healthcare, and how culture impacts attitudes toward disease and wellness. In the next section, we’ll look at what medical sociologists find when they look at how experiences of health and illness can differ by social location.
How we get sick and how we stay healthy reveals both inequality and interdependence. For example, Flint, Michigan, residents experienced higher-than-normal levels of lead toxicity, hair loss, rash, and other health issues when the local municipal government changed the water supply in 2013. Although government officials knew that the Flint River was contaminated with pollution from manufacturing, they decided to use this water for city residents because it was cheaper. Decisions at several interdependent layers of government resulted in this harmful action. Local citizens connected with doctors, health officials, and journalists to tell the story of the contaminated water and support a change.
More than 60% of the residents of Flint are Black. Over 40% of Flint’s residents live below the poverty line. This combination of race and class influenced the original decision making and community response. Eventually, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission cited systemic racism as the fundamental cause for the questionable decisions. Recovery required both individual agency and collective action. If you’d like to learn more, Flint Water Crisis: Everything You Need to Know [website] provides more details.
Conflict between values may cause social probl