MEBI 591a Personal Health informatics Seminar
April 10, 2007


Garland Wood
Medical Education & Biomedical Informatics

"Modeling the Social Construction of Health and Illness: How would a fish describe water?"

Casting Health and Illness as socially constructed phenomena provides a method to organize the forces bearing on each individual's experience of Health. Curiously, such an activity can be confusing because it is also one of social construction -- no 'privileged position' exists separate from such construction from which to view the construction. During this presentation, we explore (an instantiation of) a novel second-order model of social construction with an emphasis on the implications for contemporary healthcare.