What are the three flawed assumptions about health? What are the two common features to these assumptions?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The three flawed assumptions about health are:
1. genetics explain illness and disease to the exclusion of social factors;
2. the sick experience downward social mobility; and
3. people adopt lifestyle choices that make them sick.
For sociologists of health, these three flawed assumptions have two common features. First, they claim that when individuals become diseased, it is a problem of the individual's own body and unique biology. Sociologists, however, argue that the distinct patterns of health and illness, which we can observe along the intersections of class, power, gender, and ethnicity, demonstrate that we should not consider health and illness merely as an individual problem but rather as heavily determined by socioeconomic location.
Second, even if lifestyle behaviors were the sole cause of disease, extensive studies have shown that it is almost impossible for people to change their lifestyle on their own and in isolation from their social circumstances. The social factors that predispose people to adopt unhealthy lifestyles-work stress, for example-are often ignored in treatment plans that focus on immediate causes like diet, cholesterol, or drinking. Instead we need to see these risk factors in context, to understand how individuals are exposed to them and why they have limited access to resources for responding to them (Clougherty et al., 2010). The lack of such resources is the fundamental cause of disease patterns. If we want to change the patterns of disease, we must change the patterns of inequality that produce them, and not focus solely on their downstream impact on the individual.