Experience of illness and disability
In our day and age, the question of illness/diseases and healing encompasses a broad array of issues. It has become established that a number of factors determine the state of health of contemporary man; a dividing point in this assertion is the fact that there is no established consensus in the definition and description of health. However, within the wide scope of the diverse contentions about disease and healing, there still exists the tendency to loosely categorize them according to two main historical phases before eventually settling on what it is said to be.
In tandem to the foregoing, hitherto to the discovery of western orthodox medical practice and its attendant Anglo-Saxon protestant Christianity roots, primitive societies already had functional and institutionalized concepts developed to manage all forms of complications that limited the ability of the individual to engage in either all or some of his usual daily activities with relative ease . The emphasis here was not placed on the ailment or disabling state but the combination of the immediate and remote causative factors. The approach used was not on diagnostic therapy but multi-faceted rehabilitative approach to healing. It should also be noted that the thrust of the work done under this area was administered by a specialized segment of indigenous healers whose work can best be described as built on superstitious belief systems.
In direct contrast to the non-western orthodox medical practice of healing, the modern day practice of healing is built on tentative scientific evidence of the influence of microorganisms in contributing to the process of destabilizing the body’s equilibrium. The process of healing is executed along conventionally established ethical standards of accuracy and precision. It makes little or non at all for superstitious attributions and outright speculations. With the dawn of western orthodox medicine, the primitive traditional process of healing is loosing substantial grounds to the former. Nevertheless, it has not being totally wiped to oblivion, in view of the fact that it still has a significant quantity of adherents. It has also become established that the entire process of conceptualizing health and what it entails is highly subjective, in other words it means different things to different people at different times. It is against this background that this paper will be conducting an analytical discussion of a typical case study involving an HIV carrier mother and her little daughter and how the environment in which they are living as having on the overall understanding of their ailment and what that means to the HIV positive mother, her HIV positive daughter and their society.
The analysis presented in this paper makes use of authoritative sociological concepts to objectively embark on a lucid presentation of the interrelated factors in the domain and practice of conventional medicine vis-a-vis its stated approach to the management of chronic or disabling diseases.
The HIV-AIDS Saga
Conventional western and orthodox medicine has been seriously put to the test by the advent of the HIV-AIDS. The disease is currently on a very disturbing devastating sweep in the third world particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Going by the logical sequence of the fourth case study, involving Liz, it is somewhat probable to connect the possibility of Liz’s contraction of the HIV virus with her place of birth, which is Africa. Demographically, it is the region with the highest prevalence and infection rate (Green, 1994).
Previous studies have widened our understanding to the truths about the internal dynamics of disability. For instance, Bury (1992) and Friendson (1970), allude to the sociological bases of the experiences of ill-health among people. According to them, it transcends the regular physiological changes resulting in outward impairments and limitations. There is an inherently deeper meaning assigned to illnesses in general but more specifically some category of diseases carry deeper messages than others.
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