JOEY ABINDAN

1. How do structural functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism help us

understand illness and healthcare?

Structural Functionalist Perspective

Structural functionalism emphasizes or focuses on how health is an important aspect when it

comes to the interconnected parts of society and its function. If ill health affects a majority of a
population, society’s functioning and stability declines and suffers. This is evidential in today’s
society, in regards with the major outbreak of COVID-19 affecting the global scale, and how
society in some parts have disintegrated and suffered. Due to pandemic economic sectors have
suffered great losses from the macro to the micro scale. As such, businesses who relied on
physical services and social interaction have either closed down or been forced on hiatus.
International trades were also at minimal in safety of viral transmissions. Education was
compelled to initiate learning in a different manner aside from physical face-to-face interactions,
which have also caught society especially the Philippines off guard. This is recognizing the lack
of individual resources to cope with the new educational system. More importantly, the
healthcare system had staggered due to the lack of antiviral resources, government funds,
expert personnels, and the avoidance of physical interaction. Moreover, functionalism explains
how the sick can't perform their societal roles and thereby cripple the overall function of society.

Conflict Perspective

The conflict perspective suggests or spotlights on how issues in the current healthcare system
are entrenched in a capitalist society. According to the perspective, health was commodified
due to the pursuit of profit. It also emphasizes the inequality that occurs in society when it
comes to healthcare. It also suggests how physicians have often labeled social problems as
medical problems, mostly with the interests of making money. Relating this to the current
pandemic, the indicative of inequality and health disparities are due to social stratification or
classes, racism, sexism, ageism, and etc. Health despite as a comodity, a number of poor
families in the Philippines have slower access to a proper healthcare system, still are working in
harsh conditions despite being exceedingly vulnerable and susceptible in acquiring the virus,
and oftentimes denied better health treatment due to financial incapabilities and discrimination.
Inequalities were evidential when it comes to what social class are mostly affected, and how the
healthcare system treats the members of each particular class.

Symbolic Interactionist Perspective

The symbolic interactionist perspective regards health and illness as socially constructed. It
discusses how a specific condition can only be considered as health or illness when society
acknowledges or defines it. And how society builds a construct for health and illness through
social interaction. The world has been dismissing COVID-19 on its first stage of viral
transmission despite it’s rapid transmissions; this was until WHO declared it as a pandemic, and
the rush for societal lockdowns were felt over the media. This is attributed to how society can
only treat an anomaly or condition as an illness when a reliable healthcare institution or the
general social consensus labels it. However, the downside is the labeling of certain conditions
that aren’t illness as such. In this concern, pharmaceutical and medical personnels have
profited billions. Based solely on my personal experience, I overheard a few people claiming
that COVID-19 is not real, and that it was just the government’s dramatic attempt for corruption
and a few more conspiracy theories. This, in fact, concretizes the way society can associate
symbols and mental constructs to apprehend certain conditions. This affected how society and
its healthcare system reacted to the pandemic before it was declared as one. And even by then,
some have certain misgivings in the matter of viewing covid-19. This is evidential in the
statement that only the aged, sickly, and children are vulnerable; when in fact, anyone can be.
So laxness in following restrictions by some individuals were observed, and even by some
healthcare system when it comes to treating seemingly healthy patients.