In this sociology class, I expanded my knowledge of how health and illness affect people’s lives. Healthcare experiences are different for everyone and in this class, I learned to analyze the perspectives of people from different backgrounds. We went through experiences in maintaining health, chronic illness, acute illness, and death and dying. The curriculum also focused on other important aspects of healthcare, including attitudes towards healthcare, inequalities within the system, and the effects of recent trends, such as medicalization. We also looked at healthcare and the experience of illness through a historical perspective, allowing me to see how the system developed into what it is today.

Through the writing assignments, I had to use a sociological perspective to see how the healthcare system affects people. I also had to analyze how healthcare can be used as a form of social control. After taking this course, I can look at the world with a more critical perspective and see more of the underlying social and power structures in medicine. The information I learned in this course will help me in the future since I am planning on working in the healthcare system. It is important for me to understand the power structures and the experiences of others in order to responsibly participate in the system.

I took this course in order to expand my Spanish vocabulary to include medical terms. In this course, I learned important vocabulary words for different body systems, including the digestive system, the sensory systems (vision and hearing), the respiratory system, the muscular and skeletal systems, the nervous system, the integumentary system, the cardiovascular system, the endocrine system, and the reproductive system. This expanded vocabulary will be valuable to me in the future, since I am planning on joining the medical field as a dentist. I want to be able to serve Spanish speaking patients in my career and having the vocabulary base is extremely important.

In addition to vocabulary, the curriculum focused on important aspects of the cultural experience of being a Spanish-speaking person receiving medical treatment in the United States of America. This instruction helped me improve my skill of cultural competence, which will help me once I am a medical professional working with people from different cultural backgrounds.

An assignment in the course required me to volunteer in the community, which connected me with the Birmingham clinic, which offers medical services for free to low-income members in the community. I plan on volunteering with the organization in the future as a volunteer Spanish interpreter, as many of the patients are Spanish speakers.

In this course, we analyzed the healthcare system through a sociological perspective. This entailed critically analyzing various aspects of medicine, including factors that affect health outcomes, the social distribution of illness, the experience of illness and disability, the general structure of the healthcare system in the United States and throughout the world, the profession of medicine, alternative healthcare, and issues in bioethics. This was a broad course that covered a large amount of subject matter. The most important lesson I learned through this course was that experiences with health and healthcare vary drastically in the United States and throughout the world. Factors such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and gender affect important health outcomes such as life expectancy and infant mortality. This information was extremely valuable to me because I am planning on working in the healthcare system and need to understand how the system is set up to favor some and disfavor others. With a topic as important as health, I am happy to learn more about these inequalities so that I can do my part in the future to change the system for the better.

Additionally, the course analyzed how healthcare is currently changing with developing technologies and alternative medicine becoming increasingly popular. This has important impacts on how people view their health and experience the healthcare system. This information is crucial for me to know, since I will be stepping into a constantly evolving medical landscape.

There was some overlap between this course and the “Health and Illness” course I took in terms of analyzing how different backgrounds affect the experience of healthcare. However, this course looked more at the systemic structures within healthcare and society, while “Health and Illness” focused more on how an individual experiences their own health and illness.

Even though everyone in the world eats, the underlying processes behind food choice and attitudes towards food are not simple. These are some of the major lessons that I learned in this course. Throughout the curriculum, we read a variety of pieces by different academics who analyzed why people have their attitudes towards food. Since food is so crucial to health, it is important to understand the cultural significance of food. The readings took me on a journey through human history, discussing how humans developed their nutritional requirements and how food is intimately tied with culture. In this course, I learned how to analyze seemingly simple aspects of food sharing, such as recipes and cookbooks, in order to discover how complex social structures and trade relationships created the cuisines we eat today. Food is anything but simple and this course taught me how to analyze food in a more comprehensive way.

I learned about myself in this course as well, since I could not help but to think critically about what I eat and why I eat what I eat. Overall, this course was beneficial to me in both understanding myself and those around me.

This course focuses on analyzing disease patterns in populations and employing programs in order to manage health in a population. Viewing health from a larger perspective, whether community-based or global, can allow the health of many people to be improved at once. Someday I would love to work in public health and this class helped me learn the basics of one of the biggest aspects of public health, epidemiology.

Through the skills I learned in this class, I can now compare the health outcomes of different populations and use methods such as “person, place, and time” in order to investigate the causes of outbreaks. These skills will help me think critically about health on a larger scale and understand where public health programs and recommendations come from. In my future as a healthcare provider, I will use these skills to hopefully improve the health of my community.