Social Patterning of Health, Reaction Paper Example

Aronowitz (1) is investigating the answer to the question: “‘‘how does culture get under the skin?’’ While the relationship between health outcomes, culture and social class has been discovered long ago, the author attempts to review latest publications on the topic in order to develop a framework that is suitable for social patterning of diseases and health (2).

The author uses the example of high prevalence of asthma among the urban poor. Aronowitz (3) argues that while economic and environmental examinations can be useful to create a social patterning framework, the same issue can also be viewed “‘and understood with the methods of a cultural anthropologist or medical historian”. The author further argues that technological change and economic, policy changes also affect health outcomes. (3).

According to Aronowitz, health outcome dynamics are impacted by self-sustaining processes based on perceived risk and fear. Indeed, this is a significant finding, however, if the processes are self-sustaining, it is more valuable to slow down the impact in the beginning to reduce the escalation of the issue, rather than tackling the self-sustaining process itself. If we can reduce the number of asthma cases among urban poor through education and prevention, the self-sustaining process will no longer be valid. The author states, “some of the racial and socio-economic disparity evident in obesity rates is functional, not only a direct consequence of inequalities in access to healthy foods and other determinants”.  This indicates that,

the best approach to creating a framework that tackles health outcome disparities is to reduce the impact of one’s socio-economic and minority status on their health. Therefore, a multi-disciplinary approach that is based on assessment of patterns related to environments, social, economic and minority status is the only solution to reduce health disparities.

References

Aronowitz, R. “Framing disease: An Underappreciated Mechanism for the Social Patterning of Health”. Social Science & Medicine. 67 (2008) p.1-9. 2008. Print.