Dr. Corey Stevens specializes in medical sociology and gender. We are so excited that she is helping generate a sociological understanding of the health field.
Medical sociology is one of my favorite classes to teach. For one thing, I find the topic really interesting. But more importantly, I think that sociology provides a useful lens as we deal with health crises in our society such as the opioid epidemic, the looming Covid19 pandemic, and the debate over the future of our country’s fractured and inefficient health care system. In the Medicine, Health and Society class, we discuss how social factors – like social class, racism, stigma, etc. – don’t just influence health and illness, but are fundamental in determining who gets sick and who has the power and resources to stay healthy.
Sociology pulls the public health conversation away from ineffective and often moralizing discourses about individual health behaviors and challenges students to think about how social structure and institutions shape and constrain individual choices. For instance, we cannot solve the opioid crisis without examining how drug companies have profited off of promoting opioids as “non-addictive pain management” or how the social conditions of isolation and economic depression lead people to turn to drugs. We cannot adequately contain the spread of Covid19 when many people do not receive paid time off from work to care for sick family members or to quarantine themselves when they are sick.
We also discus social policies around health care – which is crucial during election season when voters are weighting the merits of Medicare for all, the public option, and health savings accounts. We discuss how the system does – and more often doesn’t – work in the US. We discuss how we got to this point historically. We talk about how other countries manage to provide health care to all their citizens at a fraction of the cost we spend here in the US. Students are asked to think about how we can improve our health care systems using the lessons learned from other wealthy democracies.
Finally, we leave on a hopeful note. Health and illness are certainly driven by biological and genetic factors. But when we use our Sociological Imagination, we find that who gets sick and why is often a matter of social policy. We created these structures of inequality which shape health outcomes. This means we can collectively remake them through advocacy, consciousness raising, and demanding equitable social policies.
