Disease Process & Theories Throughout History
Disease Process
It is a dynamic process, which indicates movement, transformation, rotation, and permanent change. The explanation is that health and disease depend on objective and subjective questions (how the production and reproduction of material and spiritual life are organized and how man explained the world around him), which can lead to different states of health and different perceptions of what being healthy or sick is.
Magic-Religious Design
– The disease results from forces outside the body – supernatural forces – introduced due to sin or a curse.
– In some cultures, the shaman was the tribal witch doctor in charge of expelling, through rituals, evil spirits that had taken control of the person, causing disease. The shaman’s task was to summon spirits to eradicate evil. For that, they used plants with hallucinogenic substances, decoys for the spirits capable of fighting the disease.
In Greece, the explanation for health and disease was found in mythology. A cure was achieved using plants and natural methods, including recovering hygienic practices. Yet, rituals were still held to obtain the cure.
– Hippocrates developed the theory of humors, postulating the existence of four fluids (humors) in the body: yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood. The state of health is a balance between these elements, influenced by the seasons, weather, food, and exercise, among others.
Religious Christian Design
– Design of the disease: the result of sin and healing as a matter of faith.
– Medical monastic characterized by using herbs and prayers to cure diseases.
Contagionist Theory and Miasma Theory
– The disease is now located in the body’s organs – medical studies have turned to understanding the body’s functioning and the anatomical changes incurred during diseases, the location of the disease, and revealing the language of signs and symptoms.
– Theory of contagion: a pathological substance generated by the body. Infection would occur from person to person, air, and fomites – forty-isolation.
– Miasma theory: miasma of regions would be unhealthy fumes that could cause diseases like malaria (bad air) – the environment is considered the source of all causes of disease.
Germ Theory – Bacteriological Era
– The Bacteriological Era (late 19th century) is conceived as a result of discovering microorganisms as causative agents of diseases initiated by Pasteur.
– Germ theory: It argues that for every disease, an etiologic agent must be identified and tackled through vaccines and chemicals to destroy the causative agent – the disease is understood as a dysfunction, an imbalance in the body caused by the interaction of man with physical, chemical, and biological processes that cause changes in the body.
Multicausal Theory
– Theory of multiple reasons: The disease is caused not only by microorganisms or other agents but also by how society and culture are organized.
– Human biology: genetic, biological processes inherent to life and aging factors.
– The environment: soil, water, air, housing, work…;
– Lifestyle: decisions that affect health (habits, physical exercises;
– Organization of health care: medical care, medicines, sanitation, food, etc.
Social Determination Theory of Health
– The concept of cause in the unicausalidade version of the multiple causes requires identifying independent events linked by a unidirectional link, rarely observed in biological and social processes: cause and effect relationship.
– The concept of determination is more appropriate for understanding complex social processes because it requires the complete isolation of variables or the notion of independence between them. There is a reciprocal interaction between various dimensions of social and biological motion.
– The social organization of the material life of men and material determines the epidemiological profile of each social class in society.
– The social modes of production of life, with their circumstances favorable or harmful to health, ultimately define the health problems most often associated with each social group.
– Health and disease are historical and social. The social nature of the disease does not occur in the clinical case but characteristically of illness and death in human groups.
The social nature of the disease is not liable to seizure by studying the patient but by the pathological profiles that social groups show, which change over time and are under the transformations of society.
– The theory of social determination differs from the previous one by the importance it attaches to the social organization in producing the health-disease process.
– Health and disease: a summary of all determinations operating in a specific society and manifesting in profiles or patterns of health and/or disease.