Imagining health problems as social issues

This chapter introduces you to the sociological perspective and how it can be used to understand a wide range of health issues. Health sociology focuses on the social patterns of health and illness—such as the different health statuses between women and men, the poor and the wealthy, or the Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations—and seeks social rather than biological or psychological explanations. It provides a second opinion to the conventional medical view of illness derived from biological and psychological explanations,by exploring the social origins of health and illness—the living and working conditions that fundamentally shape why some groups of people get sicker and die sooner than others.