Biosocial frameworks
- I survived week 1!
- This week we discussed different frameworks to assess biosocial pathways to health.
- Not a new idea, that health should result from the interaction between the social context, a person's behaviours, and the biological mechanisms that underly life.
- No surprise either that the response of an individual to their environment should affect both environment and individual.
- See here for an overview of the biopsychosocial approach in healthcare.
- The relationships between these three poles (biology, social and behaviour) are two-way, with the social context being an influencer to both behaviour and biology, but also malleable enough to be modified by a person's biological specificity (illness? power?) and their behaviours.
- Not complicated? Let me tell you. Please see below my attempt to collate the different theories that we talked about this week - from life course approaches (events across the life course will influence health at some point), to development (what happens in childhood will INEVITABLY influence health at some point), biological embedding (social experiences are translated within the body), theories of stress etc.
- These frameworks need to run in parallel. The thing is that a life course approach necessarily includes child development, and the impact of social economic factors present in early life will ripple in different ways, generating illness or being buffered by intrinsic resilience, like an individual's genetic profile.
- Resilience will not be enough if the load of adversities (be they social or biological) become too much - tipping the balance, generating, again, illness. Maybe not now, it might come later.
- Or life might have been a dream up to a point, and then something happens in the world (a global pandemic?! Surely not!) that changes everything - the social circumstances (social isolation, unemployment, changes in a person's roles), behaviours (no more hugs) and biology (viral infection, long cover etc).
- Changes may come from close to home, but may happen at a community or even global scale.
- Changes all leave a mark, and when talking about illness, each factor will play a part of the disease ecology.
- Examples of disease ecologies coming up next week :)
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