Perspectives on Health, Illness, and Well-being
A combination of genetics, individual behaviour or medical care does not account for good health or illness. There are a number of perspectives which determines the health outcomes, depending on the socio-cultural, environmental and economic condition of UK which has an effect on the lives of the community people (Marmot and Allen, 2015). These perspectives accounts for determining the health outcome, with wide variations among different communities owning to the social inequalities. The social inequalities determine extent of getting physical, personal and social resources to attaining goals and changing to dynamic environment. Psycho-social factors also acts as an important determinant to gain better health outcomes, acting as the mediator. There is evidence based knowledge that social inequalities have a wide implication on health behaviour and illness, and addressing these differences will enable making health framework achieve health equity. According to the Dahlgren and Whitehead model, there are certain health determinants and individualistic constitutional factors which have direct implication on age, genetics, and lifestyle (GOV.UK, 2019).
The assessment focuses on studying 3 different perspectives which has direct influence on health, illness and wellbeing using 2 health promotion and disease eradication models namely, the Biomedical model and Bio-psychosocial model. Based on the three perspectives of health from WHO standards, ecological concept and traditional medicines perspectives, the health and wellbeing is defined through the above mentioned models. Three orientations of health have been discussed to give clear coverage on the perspectives of health, illness and well being.
Biomedical model of health
The biomedical model of health focuses on the biological and physical aspect of illness and disease. This care model is practices by doctors, nurses and other healthcare providers, for diagnosis diseases, and gaining perspectives for treatment, cure from the diseases (Farre and Rapley, 2017). This model directly emphasises on treatment through diagnoses, and providing lifestyle treatment of individuals, disability with attempting to cure. According to the basics of the model, being healthy ascertains being free from any kind of illness, disease, defect or pain, thereby making the health condition of humans normal. As the model is based on objective facts based on the physical needs of the individuals, it does not focus on the social or subjective factors that determine individualistic behaviour. It focuses on the biological factors of an individual and does not include the environmental, social or psychological influences.
The main advantages of this model are its use of scientific method trusted by public providing factual objective information on diagnosis. It helps in prevention of the illnesses thereby detecting diseases and treating the patients (Deacon and McKay, 2015). The model is used widely by health professionals, in top-down approach to achieve high results, with high success rates like eradiating small pox. It helps in prevention of disease, which is better than cure; through preventative methods like diagnostics, vaccinations etc, which eliminates any future chance of disease. However, the model does not promote positive health but more on absence of disease. It does not envisage a holistic approach to health, and makes individuals dependant on wide-scale use of medications with side-effects. Moreover treatment procedures may not be effective on the root-cause of the disease with long implications.
The Biomedical Model of Health
The bio-psychosocial model views general health behaviours and illnesses from the biological perspective, behavioural factors and social perspectives, envisaging genes, lifestyle, and social influences respectively. Health professionals hence use various treatment methods for interventions to promote healthy behaviours through individualistic and group levels. This model was developed in 1977 by George Engel, recognising the three main factors affecting health (Ip et al., 2019). The biological factors affecting health includes gender, age, illness genes; psychological factors include behaviour, perception, beliefs; and social factors include community, social relationship etc. this model includes the holistic scope of an individual’s health and wellbeing including their emotions, stress, environmental surroundings, economic conditions, and occurrence of any illness.
This model was created to counter the shortcomings of the Biomedical model of health, by recognising other influencing factors of diseases, and explaining why 5 people actually develops the measles disease, when 10 people were exposed to measles conditions. The model also takes into consideration somatic factors, providing a realistic framework of why non-communicable diseases are growing in the present world. In addition, the model also includes the socio-environmental factors, which has immense impact on treatment of a disease. Hence, recently this model has been used widely by the health professionals to provide a holistic approach of health and wellbeing (Taukeni, 2019).
The three orientations of health includes, feeling-state orientation including the general feelings of wellbeing. Symptom orientation wherein there is an absence of any disease. There is also performance orientation which includes actions partaken by people who are healthy. The concept of health is a combination of factors dealing with age, social status, education, religion, and physical conditions. As education increases the feeling-state orientation decreases; as age increases the symptom orientation decreases; moreover an individualistic society emphasizes performance orientation more than community-based society (Boruchovitch and Mednick, 2002).
In UK, there are certain determinants of health which poses unequal health access to the wider community. The environment in UK includes neighbourhood, housing, food, transportation, and sustainable natural environment. Air quality in UK presents risk, as there are huge amount of air pollutants, with PM 2.5, increasing chances of pulmonary diseases, heart problems and mortality (Marmot, 2015). High emissions in urban landscapes reduce the air quality, thereby having an effect on symptom-orientation perspective on health and wellbeing, more on disadvantaged community. There is unequal distribution of greenery, with less affordability of proper housing for disadvantaged communities, resulting in homelessness. These factors affect the feeling-state orientation perspective of wellbeing (Marmot and Allen, 2015).
Advantages and Limitations of the Biomedical Model
In social trends, there is unequal access to school readiness with fewer children from Low SES getting access to free-meals. There is deprivation among low SES children highlighting inequality in access to education, affecting feeling-state orientation. Poverty ratio increased in UK with rise in Minimum-Income-Standard households along with child poverty along with child labour (Marmot, 2018). Unemployment had decreased since 2016 yet remains varied across different sets of population, among different ethnic groups. As a result crime levels among the low-SES households have increased along with victims in deprived locations. Offences increased from 10.6/1000 in 2013 to 20.0/1000 in 2017. Meanwhile social capital has decreased with less sense of belongingness resulting in lower feeling-state orientation (GOV.UK, 2019).
There has been inequality in life-expectancy among low-SES groups, between males and females of high class society and low status societies (Donkin et al., 2018). Increase in heart diseases, non-communicable disease, pulmonary problems and cancer has been ever-increasing. Moreover there also has been inequality of mortality rates due to from such diseases in deprived areas, twice high than high-end places. Inequality in children’s health along with increase in behavioural risk factors including smoking prevalence, binge-drinking, unhealthy diet and more mental illnesses are justified through performance-orientation perspective of health (GOV.UK, 2019).
Individual health behaviour envisages a multifaceted perspective to adopting, changing, maintaining healthy behaviour, reducing illnesses and promoting health through individual adjustments in lifestyle. Through use of the biomedical model and bio-psychosocial model, individuals can improve their health behaviour, through educational and awareness-based interventions. Self-examination and identifying problems through continuous improvement is being utilised to improve individual’s awareness about possibilities of different diseases, and its cure or prevention. Psychosocial methods include providing emotional support; coping skills to individuals, improving own quality of life by reducing bad practices that increases chances of developing critical illnesses. Individual interventions can be planned through following a healthy lifestyle and implementing changes in the habits, so that critical diseases can be prevented. Individual interventions are made to accommodate healthy habits to reduce smoking, alcohol abuse, maintain fitness through physical activities, eating healthy, and having good mental wellbeing (Paskett et al., 2016). Support from families, societies, communities are indeed helpful in improving healthy behaviour among population, as they provide social support and services that orient people to adapt quickly to healthy behaviour.
Conclusion
Throughout the assessment detailed discussion on the two models of health namely Biomedical and Bio-psychosocial models have been provided, on three perspectives of health and wellbeing. Highlighting the various influencing factors and determinants of health in UK, feeling-state orientation, Symptom orientation, and performance orientation have been discussed. The individual and group behaviour of promoting health, through socio-cultural, economic and environmental perspectives have also been highlighted, to provide a holistic view of the health behaviour in UK.
References
Boruchovitch, E. and Mednick, B.R., (2002). The meaning of health and illness: some considerations for health psychology. Psico-USF, 7(2), pp.175-183.
Deacon, B.J. and McKay, D., (2015). The biomedical model of psychological problems: A call for critical dialogue. Lancet, 16, pp.2-3.
Donkin, A., Goldblatt, P., Allen, J., Nathanson, V. and Marmot, M., (2018). Global action on the social determinants of health. BMJ global health, 3(Suppl 1), p.e000603.
Farre, A. and Rapley, T., (2017, December). The new old (and old new) medical model: four decades navigating the biomedical and psychosocial understandings of health and illness. In Healthcare (Vol. 5, No. 4, p. 88). Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute.
GOV.UK. (2019). Chapter 5: inequalities in health. [online] Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/health-profile-for-england-2018/chapter-5-inequalities-in-health#introduction [Accessed 25 Oct. 2019].
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Ip, L., Smith, A., Papachristou, I. and Tolani, E., (2019). 3 Dimenions for Long Term Conditions-creating a sustainable bio-psychosocial approach to healthcare. International Journal of Integrated Care (IJIC), 19.
Marmot, M. and Allen, J., (2015). Health priorities and the social determinants of health. EMHJ-Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal, 21(9), pp.671-672.
Marmot, M., (2015). The health gap: the challenge of an unequal world. The Lancet, 386(10011), pp.2442-2444.
Marmot, M., (2018). Health equity, cancer, and social determinants of health. The Lancet Global Health, 6, p.S29.
Paskett, E., Thompson, B., Ammerman, A.S., Ortega, A.N., Marsteller, J. and Richardson, D., (2016). Multilevel interventions to address health disparities show promise in improving population health. Health Affairs, 35(8), pp.1429-1434.
Taukeni, S.G., (2019). Introductory Chapter: Bio-Psychosocial Model of Health. In Psychology of Health-Biopsychosocial Approach. IntechOpen.
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