COMS 2500 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Disease Mongering, World Health Organization, Reductionism

• School: Carleton University
• Department: Communication and Media Studies
• Course: COMS 2500
• Professor: Scott Mitchell

Document Summary

Advertising and promotion as medium of science in health, food, and pharma. Blackbox: used in diagrams, represents a complicated mechanism. All you need to know is what you imput and what you get out of it. Blackbox represents the complex things that cause the output. As a public, we are not told about the blackbox. Problem with the blackbox: the attempt to reduce complex interactions to isolated simple relations, blackboxing of phenomena, the story of ted(cid:495)s cancer: reduced his cancer to the simple question of (cid:494)did he smoke? (cid:495) World health organization defines health as a state of complete, physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Science is socially constructed: medicalization (in contrast to the socioecological view of health, culturally specific notions of health (think: disappearance of midwifery in the early, reducing health to: ability to work + (cid:494)lifestyle choices(cid:495) (cid:523)i. e. , healthy appearance(cid:524)