This written assignment is about what I learn about health and wellness as it relates to sociology according to my assigned readings. So, I will be discussing the concepts of cure, healing, disease, and illness. This discussion of health and wellness will be based on the two subsequent perspective on health and illness.The first subsequent perspective is called the Social Constructionist and the second subsequent perspective is called the Functionalist approach to health and illness. What are your experiences with health and illness?

The World Health Organization define health as the state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, not just free of diseases (WHO, 2020). I like how the World Health Organization define health. I say that because as some people such as myself use to think that to be healthy only means that you are free of all diseases. However, illness is has a different definition; according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary illness is define as an unhealthy condition of body or mind.

So, I will be discussing further about concept of cure, healing and disease from the theoretical approach as we as from the social structural approach. I will start this discussion by giving you a brief synopsis of the two approaches.

I believe that people get cure and healing confused just as when people often take disease, sickness and illness to mean the same. When individuals experience disease, there is always a tendency to think in obsolete terms of being curable and incurable. According to a research complete by Thomas R. Egnew; we learn that when we talk of curing ourselves, we are actually talking about a healing process performed by getting rid of the symptoms that describe a disease (Egnew, The meaning of healing: transcending suffering 2005).

I also learn that healing is a distinctive from a cure, in which a person take a personal approach. That approach is a wholeness and a spiritual experience for that person. Egnew described healing as an integrative process which goes farther than our physical limitation and into a mental, emotional and spiritual wholeness.

I personally found the research that Egnew conducted and documented to be very intriguing. He mentioned that cure could be faster than healing because healing often requires time. He noted that an individual can be cured without the process of healing and the opposite is also true, which is that an individual can be healed without having to be cured (Egnew, The meaning of healing: transcending suffering 2005).

According to what I read in the textbook about illness, I learned that there is a distinction of illness and disease. What I learned is best outlined by Eric J Cassell who is an MD and he published an article in 1976 about health. This is what he said about the differences between illness and disease: "Illness is what the patient feels when he goes to the doctor, disease is what he has on the way home". I can tell that Cassell had a great sense of humor. However, I understand what he is saying about what drives a patient to go see a doctor.

For many people including myself, I see illness as a social concern. This also reminds me of an experience I had with health and illness. I had an auto accident several months ago after which I started to feel uneasy driving. So, I went to my primary doctor because I was ill. My doctor told me that I have a mental condition called anxiety.

I learned about a researcher by the name of Talcott Parsons who published an article in 1951 in which he describe the 'sick role'. I personally thought that the way Parson described the 'sick role' sounded despotic. He basically said that being sick is the responsibilities of the person who is sick and he also said that the person had certain rights.

I wonder what Parsons meant by the person who is sick has certain rights. So, what learn is that according to his research the rights he was referring to was things such as; the right for a person to be excuse from certain responsibilities that they had. This include the right to be excuse from work, household chores, and the person should not be blamed for being sick. As, I continue to learned more about the research, I realize that Parsons was not trying to be despotic. And he also went into the details regarding a person's responsibility to recover from being sick so they can return to their normal activities. This is actually a great concept because it benefits the person who is sick and it protect society.

I did not realize how important the contact between a doctor and the patients were in the social role of illness. In the textbook I learned about a research that was completed by Byrne and Long in 1976. The researchers were able to identify some of those contact between doctor and patient and reduce them to two groups. The two groups' identify are doctor-centered and patient-centered contacts.

I want to discuss the first group. The researchers learned that, the doctor-centered contacts are doctor-led and the patient feel like they don't get a chance to talk. I have had this interaction with a doctor in the past. I had a lot of respect for the doctor. I was eager to listen to him as he took on the role of the active giver of care and I took the role of the passive recipient. I honestly did not have an issue with this approach because I am a quiet person, and also in my culture we are taught to listen to the doctor without question. Unfortunately my husband does not like this authoritative style. My husband like to ask questions and would not appreciate the traditional doctor-centered interaction.

The next group I would like to discuss is the patient-centered contacts. The researchers, Byrne and Long found out that patient-centered contacts provided an environment where the interaction is patient-led. In a patient-centered role where the experience is patient-led, the doctor takes the role of a consultant and provide a consultation to the patient. And the doctor encourages to be involved in their care by ask him or her questions. This is the type of interaction most people would prefer. The patient-led experience is my preferred interaction because the patient has the opportunity to be actively involved in their care and are provided the tools they need by the doctor to manage that care.

I would like to discuss a couple of health approaches to health and illness as it relates to sociology. The first subsequent perspective is called the social constructionist. I found this quote to be quite confounding to the principles in section 1 of our textbook and I thought it would be great to add it: about? The fact that the body became legible does not imply that some invariant biological reality was finally revealed to medical enquiry. The body was only legible in that there existed in the new clinical technical techniques a language by which it could be real (Armstrong, 1983). What do you think Armstrong was talking about?

The social constructionist perspective came from the work of two researches. The researchers are Berger and Luckmann. They published a study in 1951 called thephenomenologicalapproach. I learned that the argument made by Berger and Luckman were in regards to how people's daily experiences and their understanding of those experiences can be used to find solutions to practical issues. So, the researchers learned that this approach is relevant to health and illness in the way that we can concentrate on how individuals can pay attention to their bodies to the point that they will know when something is wrong with their body. Social constructionism believe that scientific medical knowledge is relative to social knowledge. This means that a Social Constructionist believes that all knowledge is created by social experiences and interpretation of those experiences.

The second approach to health and illness I will be discussing is the Functionalist perspective. I would like to start by sharing this quote which I believe is relevant to what we are learning about health and illness: The quote is written by one of the leading sociology of the Functionalist perspective. He said: 'The state of optimum capacity of an individual for the effective performance of the roles and tasks for which she or he has been socialised'(Parsons, 1951).

Researchers and scholars for the Functionalist perspective concluded that by talking about to the functions they perform we should see functions continues in our society I believe that the process ofsocialization. I learned that we the rules these rules of society which are translated into roles. Based on what I learn, I believe that there is an agreement among social perspective researchers. The agreement is achieved through the structuring of human behavior. The scholars of the Functionalist approach are mainly worried about the how 'sick role', is associated with illness behavior .Talcott Parsons, the researcher who is the main leader in the sociological perspective saw illness as social instead of just as physical issue.