BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES - Universitatea de Medicină şi Farmacie

physician's ability to make a full assessment is compromised and the
patient is more likely to distrust the diagnosis and proposed treatment.
Doctor - patient relationship can be analyzed in different manners.
Sociologists conceptualized it in context of social roles. As was exposed
above social role is understood as the expected behaviors (including) of
someone with a given position (status) in society towards others with the
same or other status. Accordingly the relation between doctor and patient
is an ensemble of rights and obligations of doctor towards patient as well
as vice versa. The first who define the doctor-patient relationship in term
of social role was Talcott Parsons (1951). He consider that the illness is a
form of dysfunctional deviance that requires reintegration with the social
organism. Illness, or feigned illness, exemptes people from work and other
responsibilities, and thus is potentially detrimental to the social order if
uncontrolled. Maintaining the social order required the development of a
legitimized "sick role" to control this deviance, and make illness a
transitional state back to normal role performance. In Western society,
there are four norms (rights and obligations) governing the functional sick
role.
Rights:
(1) The sick person is exempt from “normal” social roles. An
individual’s illness is grounds for his or her exemption from normal role
performance and social responsibilities. This exemption, however, is
relative to the nature and severity of the illness. The more severe the
illness, the greater the exemption. Exemption requires legitimating by the
physician as the authority on what constitutes sickness. Legitimating
serves the social function of protecting society against malingering
(attempting to remain in the sick role longer than social expectations allow
– usually done to acquire secondary gains, or additional privileges
afforded to ill persons).
(2) The sick person is not responsible for his or her
condition. An individual’s illness is usually thought to be beyond his or
her own control. A morbid condition of the body needs to be changed and
some curative process apart from person will power or motivation is
needed to get well.
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