Introduction
Social medicine is an integrative applied social science that studies public health and its determinants. This note covers its definition, history, objectives, tasks and methods, and how it relates to clinical and non-clinical specialities.
Definition
- An integrative discipline concerned with health and disease as a function of how, when and why a disease distributes itself in a population over time, as well as the health of people in relation to behaviour in social groups and individual care.
- It studies public health and its determinants.
- Health is determined by the complex influence of social, biological, physical, chemical and other elements of the environment, together with political and economic factors: labour, lifestyle, communications, education, healthcare services etc.
- WHO (1946) defined health as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not only the absence of disease or infirmity.
- Health can be public (whole population), individual or group (female/male, pregnant women, workers; specific diseases affect specific groups).
- It is an integrative applied social science that unifies medical sociology, medical ethics, medical demography, medical statistics and health economics.