Medical sociology

Medical sociology is the sociological analysis of medical organizations as well as institutions; a production of cognition and selection of methods, the actions and interactions of healthcare professionals, and the social or cultural rather than clinical or bodily effects of medical practice. The field commonly interacts with the sociology of knowledge, science and engineering studies, and social epistemology. Medical sociologists are also interested in the qualitative experiences of patients, often working at the boundaries of public health, social work, demography and gerontology to inspect phenomena at the intersection of the social and clinical sciences. Health disparities ordinarily relate to typical categories such(a) as class and race. Objective sociological research findings quickly become a normative and political issue.

Early clear in medical sociology was conducted by sociological systems theory. Parsons is one of the founding fathers of medical sociology, and applied 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 element of a wider Reid 1976.

Related fields

Social medicine is a similar field to medical sociology in that it tries to conceptualize social interactions: 241  in investigating how the study of social interactions can be used in medicine.: 9  However, the two fields hit different training, career paths, titles, funding and publication.: 241 In the 2010s, Rose and Callard argued that this distinction may be arbitrary.: 242 

In the 1950s, Strauss argued that it was important to maintains the independence of medical sociology from medicine so that there was a different perspective on sociology separate from the aims of medicine.: 242  Strauss feared that whether medical sociology started to follow the goals expected by medicine it risked losing its focus on analysing society. These fears that have been echoed since by Reid, Gold and Timmermans.: 248  Rosenfeld argues that the study of sociology focused solely on devloping recommendations for medicine has limited usage for conviction building and its findings cease to apply in different social situations.: 249 

Richard Boulton argues that medical sociology and social medicine are "co-produced" in the sense that social medicine responds to the conceptualization of medical practices created by medical sociology and alters medical practice and medical apprehension in response, and that the effects of these make adjustments to are then analyzed by medical sociology once again.: 245  He argues that the tendency to viewtheories such as the scientific method positivism as the basis for any knowledge, and conversely the tendency to conviction all cognition as associated with some activity both risk undermining the field of medical sociology.: 250 

qualitative research and began to focus more on the patient, and medical anthropology started to focus on western medicine. He argued that more interdisciplinary communication could news that updates your information both disciplines.: 97