Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The term illness experience refers to the ways in which people define and adjust to perceived interruptions to their health. It is conventional in medical sociology to distinguish between illness and disease. Illness refers to people's “lay” or subjective definitions of health problems, while disease refers to “professional” or objective definitions of health problems based on signs and symptoms. The value of this distinction is that it allows us to acknowledge that people can be ill without having a disease, and can have a disease without being ill ( Freidson 1970 ). For all its utility, the illness/disease dichotomy can also be misleading. First, it is evident that lay understandings of illness are typically informed by direct (e.g., communicated by doctors) or indirect (e.g., mediated by the Internet) representations of professional conceptions of disease. Less obviously, professional notions of disease do not emerge out of a cultural vacuum. Rather, they have their genesis in, often reflect, and must, if they are to retain their authority and legitimacy, continue to be seen to have their basis in the broader culture inhabited by prospective patients. Second, the dichotomy erroneously equates healing with allopathic medicine. There is strong evidence in North America, Europe, and elsewhere that people are turning increasingly to complementary or alternative practitioners to treat ... log in or subscribe to read full text