The Meaning Of Disease Kleinman Summary

The Meaning of Disease: Kleinman and Porter
Over the years the terms illness and disease have gone hand and hand as they have changed definition over time. Arthur Kleinman defines these words in his work The Meaning of Symptoms and Disorders and how the two words come into affect with patients and physicians throughout the world. To him, illness is a collection of the symptoms and sufferings that a human may experience, and disease is the medical term used to diagnose these symptoms and sufferings. He believes that the idea of the word illness evolves around how sick a patient may be and how it is perceived both by family members and society. The way we as a society reacts to these illnesses is based off of cultural orientation and can vary
The physician would ask the patient about their history and base the disease off of both observation and facts told by the patient. Questions such as when the issue came about, the discomfort that the illness had been causing them, and what they think could have caused the illness helped lead to the diagnosis. This aspect is similar to Kleinman’s bio-psychosocial model. Today doctors tend to stick strictly to the biomedical model, in which focuses solely on the body and the illness as a disease. Porter notes that if these questions where asked today, patients would feel a sense of discomfort almost as if they were only being asked these questions out of curiosity rather than for medical purposes. Due to these series of questions, patients and doctors before the nineteenth century were aware of environmental factors that could cause disease unlike today. They believed that the cold could clog pores and that abundant food and water were necessary to live a quality life. The turn of the nineteenth century has pulled us away from this idea and led us to what Kleinman disagrees with. Pre-nineteenth century if a patient would have come in with an illness related the disease lung cancer; the doctor would ask a series of questions as to what could have caused such a disease. Through these questions the doctor could determine if a disease such a lung cancer was actually caused by someone whom frequently smokes, or if an environmental factor such as pollution caused the disease. This lifts the assumption off of the shoulders of the patient that has the disease in thinking that it was their fault and directs them to outside factors, however these questions are infrequently asked today. Items such as X-rays, biopsies, CAT scans, and PET scans, may be beneficial in determining specific diseases