Discuss the bio-medical model of health.

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The bio medical model is the model that those in the medical field use to define illness and disease. It is formed of clinical reports from doctors all over the world. The basis of this model is that every illness and disease is caused from something biological and that no wider factors are involved. This is one of the major criticisms that people have of the bio-medical model and the alternative model that some choose to turn to instead of focusing on the bio-medical model is the social model which looks at the wider factors that are surrounding the individual.

One of the features of the bio-medical model is that illness can always be able to be dealt with by using a drug and d not by using witchcraft or spiritual means. This is one of the factors that help them go forward as they base all of their research on this and so found medicine linked to the biological body.

Many sociologists would disagree that this is not the right way forward as, alternative methods have proven to work in some cases that the bio-medical model has not been able to reach. One of these cases would be like an evil spirit taking over a person’s body and making them mentally abnormal, no medicine would be able to cure that individual except a spiritual means by which the illness had come from.

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Taylor and Field (2007) argued that those in the medical profession use the bio-medical model to help diagnosis the body and to help in intervening the body from getting diseases. Furthermore Sheeran (1995) says that there has been an increasingly successful practical application of the principles of medical knowledge in the West, where the bio-medical figure is mostly upheld.

However, Illich (2002) claims that medicine in the contemporary world, does more harm than good for us. He calls this iatrogenesis, meaning doctor caused Illnesses, and he argues that the medical world is enhancing the spread of illnesses and disease instead ...

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