When you are ill, you must be cautious of what you do next. From the reading “How Many Die from Medical Mistakes in U.S. Hospitals?”, Marshall reveals his research on estimated number of medical mistakes in major hospitals. One of the things you will take as a step to follow when you are ill may be to ‘take medicine’. However, the article tells us that medical error may cause more serious symptoms and even to death. As Foucault emphasized that “Knowledge is a form of power”, an individual should be able to understand knowledge about the body and how medical discourse is constructed through social causation and social construction. What makes you think you are ill anyways? When would be the perfect time for you to believe that you are ‘healthy’? I can still argue that I’m very healthy when I’m a smoker and also suffer from anemia, as long as I can maintain my daily routine and communicate with other people. How do you think? Do you think you are healthy? If your answer to this is yes, can you come up with any theoretical approaches that may back up your belief? As noted in the lecture, Australian Aboriginal-background people define health as “not merely being physical well-being but also refer it to the social, emotional, spiritual and cultural well-being of the whole community,” illness and health issues are pretty much social products, revealed in different ways and forms according to the individual.

When  I am ill I believe more in diet than in drugs. I often get very dizzy and even suffer from anemia, but I always refuse to take any medical drugs. I try to focus more on changing my diet and food plans as “I” believe what I eat is the major factor that determines my health. After reading the lectures and readings provided, I have realized that people often link ‘illness’ mostly with physical illness, and yes, that’s what came into my brain at first when I saw the phrase about illness. As Michel Foucault’s theory on medicine describes its form as a ‘bio power’ rather than merely a healing treatment, it is certainly true that we should be more careful when adopting a term and to be able to relate them in other ways. According to Peter Conrad and Kristin K. Barker in “The Social Construction of Illness: Key Insights and Policy Implications”, some illnesses are implanted with cultural status, and are socially constructed dependent on ‘us’, on ‘how’ we understand and accept them. Illness can be physical, emotional, social and more, but the key point is that we must find our way out to truly comprehend that it is in the realm of social construction. It was so interesting to find out that illness can be highly perspectival; one may believe ‘cold’ to be illness while the other does not. In the end, a single word or a concept can be regarded distinctively based on individual’s cultural experiences.