The Pros And Cons Of The Social Model Of Health

The most basic understanding of health is the state of being free from illness or injury. The World Health Organisation defines health as “the state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease.” Health means many different things to different people, it is a relative concept, this led sociologist to research into what ordinary people define as being “healthy”, this is known as the Lay Model which is “health as understood by people without training or formal education in medicine and/or healthcare”. Blaxter (2004) stated that if a person was able to function enough to go about their daily tasks, they were healthy. She also saw that there was a difference in health according to male and females, where

The problem with relying on people to change their lifestyles is that a lot of the population do not have the motivation to give up certain habits that are shown to lead to bad health, for example, smoking, drinking and over-eating. We also have the mentality that “It won’t happen to me” which makes it very hard to change our lifestyles completely. There’s also the problem that not all diseases can be prevented, also the results of the social model of health can only be seen after long periods of time, and the results can be directly measured.
In Conclusion, there are advantages and disadvantages to both Models of Health. They have both made significant impacts into modern medicine and the way that we live our lives as influenced my western medicine. On their own these models don’t effectively create a fully comprehensive understanding of health and how to cure illness, but together they do. As they take into account the social factors and can effectively treat illnesses that may not have obvious physical symptoms and they can effectively diagnose, treat and cure