Education and Medicine

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Chapter 14

• Education and Medicine

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Education

• Social institution through which society provides
  its members with important knowledge, including
  basic facts and job skills as well as cultural
  norms and values
• Schooling formal instruction under the
  direction of specially trained teachers

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Structural-Functional

• Socialization
• Cultural innovation through research
• Social integration
• Social placement
• Latent functions

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Conflict

• Social control
• Testing and social inequality
• Tracking assigning students to different types
  of educational programs

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Problems

• Functional Illiteracy reading and writing
  skills insufficient for everyday life
• Approx. 20 of U.S. adults read and write at an
  8th grade level or below
• Violence
• Dropouts

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School Choice

• Magnet schools that attract students
• Charters schools that have authorization from
  the state but operate independently from the
  district
• For Profit (private) schools that make money

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Medicine

• Social institution that focuses on combating
  disease and improving health.
• Health a state of complete physical, mental,
  and social well-being.

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How society impacts health

• Cultural patterns define health
• Cultural standards of health change over time
• Technology affects peoples health
• Social inequality affects peoples health

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Social epidemiology

• The study of how health and disease are
  distributed throughout a societys population

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Holistic medicine

• An approach to health care that emphasizes
  prevention of illness and takes into account a
  persons entire physical and social environment.
• Patients are people
• Responsibility, not dependency
• Personal treatment

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Who Pays?

• Socialized medicine a medical care system in
  which the government owns and operates most
  medical facilities and employs most physicians
• Direct-fee system a medical system in which
  patients pay directly for the services of
  physicians and hospitals
• Paid
• Private insurance programs
• Public insurance programs
• Health maintenance programs (HMO) organizations
  that provide comprehensive medical care to
  subscribers for a fixed fee

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Structural Functional

• Medicine as a strategy to keep people healthy
• Jobs

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Conflict

• Access to care is a huge problem in the U.S. with
  approx. 40 million people without health
  insurance
• Capitalist medicine
• Impacts social issues

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Interactionist

• Socially constructing illness
• Socially constructing treatment