Evaluate Biomedical and Socio Medical models of Health

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Evaluate the biomedical and socio medical models of health and come to your own conclusion and their usefulness in health and social care.

The biomedical model of health is useful for bringing down the number of unhealthy or disease condition and premature death. This model is where they look at the parts of the body that might work together to make sure people have good health. There is a close resemblance between the biomedical model and the negative definition of health. The bio of health focuses on the removal of  through  and effective treatment which makes is useful for helping ill patients. They look at what is wrong and fix that part of the person. If a person isn't well they would be advised to visit the doctor to be examined. If they are ill the doctor will make a diagnosis and the individual is them offered a treatment to make them better. They view the body as a machine and when a part in it goes wrong it must be fixed in order for it to work again.

This approach to health is used mostly in the western world. It’s popular and useful because it uses scientific methods, the treatment and care of people is cheaper, expert knowledge is used to achieve the results and public health has been improved. It has one focus; the actual person (biological process), rather than the social and emotional process of the individual. The biomedical model of health looks at individual physical functioning and describes bad health and illness as the presence of disease and ill symptoms as a result of physical causes such as injury or infections. The aim of it is to identify people who are at risk from a disease. It focuses on the treatment rather than the prevention as this also underpins the NHS law. This model focuses on the physical processes, such as the pathology, the biochemistry and the physiology of a disease. It does not take into account the role of a person's mind or society in the cause and treatment.

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The biomedical model of medicine has been around for centuries as the dominate model used by doctors in the diagnosis of disease. The model concentrates on the physical processes of disease and does not take into account psychological or social factors in the cause and treatment of illness. The biomedical approach is suitable to doctors and surgeons who clearly have to focus on this part of individual’s health.

The biomedical approach is to found out and isolate an exact area of dysfunction and attack it with 'outside' bodies and chemicals. Several researches is showing that the human ...

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A very good essay that evaluates the biomedical and social models of health. It is slightly stronger on the biomedical model but makes a good attempt at the social model too. The work could be enhanced by trying to apply the models to some case studies. ****