Biomedical and the socio-medical models of health

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Biomedical and the socio-medical models of health

The biomedical model of health looks at individual physical functioning and describes bad health and illness as the presence of disease and symptoms of illness as a result of physical causes such as injury or infections and doesn't look at the social and psychological factors. E.g. biomedical models assume that the complexity of individual can be reduced so that by accumulating facts about the parts that make up their body a decision about how to fix that part will result in health

The social model of health looks at how society and our environment affect our everyday health and well being, including factor such as social class, occupation, education, income and poverty, poor diet and pollution. E.g. poor housing and poverty are causes to respiratory problems and in response to these causes and origins of ill health. The socio-model aimed to encourage society to include better housing and introduce programmes to tackle poverty as a solution.

The focus of these models is principally to explain why health inequalities exist and persist. The key cultural explanation places emphasis upon pathological (i.e. personal/individual) consequences of behaviour such as poor diet, excessive