Social science & medicine. Part A, Medical sociology最新文献

Pharmacists from 6 urban centres across Canada were interviewed to determine their knowledge about alcohol and alcohol and drug interactions. Pharmacists generally performed quite poorly. Pharmacists who were more knowledgeable were also more professional in other areas of pharmacy practice. Multivariate data analysis utilizing four predictors: age, sex, work region, and work setting to predict alcohol and alcohol and drug interaction knowledge accounted for 30.7% of the variance in knowledge scores with three of the predictors, age, work region, and work setting making a significant contribution in the prediction of knowledge.

An analysis of attitudes toward continuing medical education techniques between physicians within diverse educational cohorts. A sample of primary care physicians in three Boston area community hospitals is disaggregated by year of medical school graduation. The resulting analytical categories, generation units, demonstrate different attitudes toward continuing medical education approaches. Continuing medical education planners are asked to consider the diverse needs of generation units in their development of new programs.

Based on interviews with officials in Norway during June, 1980 and on Norwegian studies. this paper presents an analysis of the development and first years of implementation of a unique. health-important national policy. The farm-food-nutrition policy of 1975–1976 seeks to bring agricultural policy into line with national nutritional and health goals, and world food needs. As such, it represents a public health approach to primary prevention.

s analysis involves an examination of the antecedent conditions, including the enabling and constraining factors within Norway's political economy and international position, that led to the policy's design, adoption, and implementation. Within this framework, particular attention is given to the confluence of information (ideas and evidence embodied in proposals over a 20-year period) and organizational linkages that were necessary to bring about structural changes.

gress toward implementation between 1976 and 1980 is assessed according to the extent to which implementing strategies were deployed and policy objectives were met.

cussion includes prospects for further implementation and a note on the outlook for a similar approach to policy in the U.S.

This paper summarizes findings from a Durango, Mexico sample which lend support to some earlier findings by Hoppe and Heller [1]. Contrary to conventional wisdom in the literature, Hoppe and Heller, in a study of Mexican-Americans living in San Antonio, Texas, hypothesized, that familism was not a deterrent to the utilization of health service by members of this lower class, ethnic population.

As in the United States, lower-class Durangans are found less likely than are their middle-class counterparts to have a stable source of medical care, and more likely to use a public as opposed to a private source of care. However, with the addition of familism as an intervening variable between class and source of health care, it is found that lower-class Mexicans with high degrees of familism are more likely to have a stable source of health care than are lower-class Mexicans possessing low commitment to familistic ties.

In aggreement with Hoppe and Heller, we see familism as a positive structural force which facilitates the seeking of health care because the family and kin group acts as a buffer between Mexican-American lower-class and Anglo middle-class society.

The consumption of psychotropic drugs in Finland, Ndrway and Sweden in the 1960s and 1970s were estimated from the available sales statistics. When measured by DDD (defined daily dose) the sales have shown a rapid increase in Norway, a little increase in Finland, and in Sweden an increase in the 1960's, but a rapid decrease in the 1970's. Each year the sales were usually highest in Sweden and lowest in Norway, but the differences between the countries became smaller with time, and in 1977 the sales were quite close. Sales of psychotropic substances in hidden psychotropic drugs were more common in Finland than in Norway or Sweden. The differing trends with time and the differences between the countries pose many questions about therapeutic practices in these countries.

The growing demand for health and social services among the retired population is one of the great challenges in the developed countries in the 1980s according to recent population estimates. As a part of a larger population survey the paper attempts to assess the present needs of the elderly in Finland. The basic health status, the ability to move, the need for assistance from another person in basic daily activities and the prevalence of selected complaints are described among 1766 persons of at least 65 years of age. They formed a nation-wide representative sample of the retired non-institutionalized population. The data, which are a part of the Finnish national health and social security survey in 1976, were collected by public health nurses in household interviews.

About 80% of the retired population had at least one defect or injury that lowered their general working capacity or activity or at least one chronic illness. This percentage did not vary greatly among the retired population by age.

One third of the retired population had restrictions on the ability to move in the age group of 65–69 years and this percentage grew by age so that the same proportion was about 50% in the age group of 75 years and over. Women suffered more often than men from restrictions on the ability to move.

The need for assistance from another person in basic daily activities grew clearly by age among the retired population. House cleaning and shopping were activities for which the need for assistance from another person was the most frequent. The need for assistance was rather rare for dressing, visits to the WC and eating among the non-institutionalised retired population, which suggested that problems in these activities were one of the main factors causing institutionalization.

Fatigue and sleeplessness were the most prevalent perceived complaints among the retired population. Women experienced all complaints more often than men.

The results supported the views that the health problems of the very old are different from those of the younger retired population, because the functional health status, i.e. the social consequences of health problems, seems to initiate a greater need for care among the more elderly age groups.

A retrospective comparison of smoking habits and reported illness in Roseto, Pennsylvania and Tecumseh, Michigan was undertaken to determine the role of different systems of social support in abating the consequences of risk behaviors such as smoking on chronic diseases. In this study of 898 adult inhabitants of Roseto, a demographically homogeneous Italian-American community and 4590 adult inhabitants of Tecumseh, a heterogeneous geographically defined community, smoking habits were related to health and social characteristics. Smokers in both communities of both sexes had less education than nonsmokers, although the reverse was true among women with 13 years or more of education. The smoking habits of husbands and wives were also similar. No significant relationship was found in either community between smoking (or the amount smoked in Roseto) and coronary heart disease, hypertension, or somatic complaints. Cigarette smoking was more common, however, among respondents with a history of peptic ulcers, and in Roseto these persons with ulcers also tended to be heavy smokers. A greater prevalence of hypertension was observed in Tecumseh among males and females than in Roseto. These results are interpreted in light of differing systems of social support in the two communities.

One of the major health policies in the People's Republic of China since the Communist Revolution in 1949 has been an unique effort to integrate Chinese Traditional and Western-style medicine. Mao Tse-tung called for a ‘United Front’ of the two medical approaches for reasons of cultural pride, economic necessity and political obligation. An analyses of this policy is presented combining previous discussions of the issue with material collected in the PRC in 1979. Four possible modes of response to the policy are hypothesized and data analyzed to suggest which mode they fit. It is suggested that four modes of response could have been, and continue to be, Total Integration, Selective Integration. Assimilation or Rejection. Data collected include (1) personal statements on preference for Traditional or Western medicine, (2) examples of institutional approaches to integration, (3) lists of conditions being treated with one or combined approaches and (4) examples of the teaching of Traditional medicine. The current status of the original policy is described based on a briefing at the China Medical Association. With reference to the implementation of the Integration policy, the tentative conclusion is that throughout the PRC health care system. Traditional medicine is subordinate to a Western medical frame of reference and Western-style practitioners. Selective integration is the typical mode of response.

Some socio-economic factors in well-nourished children, children with low weight for age, but without signs of kwashiorkor or marasmus and children with obvious kwashiorkor were compared.

The well-nourished and stunted children came from very similar homes, except that the stunted children were poorer. Typically they were in the care of their own mothers and supported by their fathers.

In contrast, children with kwashiorkor came from disorganized homes. Typically they had been deserted by their fathers and less than half were in the care of their mothers. In addition, many were in the care of unsuitable guardians.

It was concluded that the main cause of low weight for age in the Ciskei is poverty, while the main cause of kwashiorkor is the disruption of family life, associated, in this area, with the migrant labour system and occurring in a poverty situation.

The mothers' educational experience in the three groups was similar and bore no relationship to their children's nutrition.

The solution to malnutrition in the Ciskei is considered to be the reestablishment of African family life based on viable employment with an economic wage structure which allows the members of a family to live together under one roof.

The sick-role model of Parsons, with its professionalist bias, and with its underlying notion of illness as deviance, has been vulnerable to sustained criticism for its failure to take into account the lay's participation in the illness process. Accordingly, the model does not really apply to situations of the chronically ill and the permanently handicapped, in which the resumption of the patient's independence depends more on the resources at his/her disposal than on medical intervention. This study of 430 women affiliated with Israel's largest comprehensive health care deals with variations between the sick-roles in acute and chronic conditions, focusing on those behavioral expectations of Parsons' model which have implications for the extent of dependency granted to the ill. As expected, the extent of dependency which the respondents would allow, was indeed found to rest largely upon the prospects implied by medical diagnosis. But Parsons' supposition that the professionals would have a dominant role in caring for the ill and in defining their sick-role expectations has not been confirmed. A sequence of cluster analyses revealed two distinct sets of expectations corresponding to the sick-roles for acutely and for chronically ill. Although the chronically ill were allowed less dependency than the acutely ill, a more crucial role in their treatment was assigned to the lay significant others than to professionals. Moreover, the contribution of the lay was found to be the most prominent dimension in the cognitive process by which the lay respondents formed the behavioral expectations of the ill. Accordingly, it was the concern about the care and support of lay others rather than about medical care which was found to provide the best criterion for differentiating between the revealed clusters.