VCE · Health HD · Health Promotion Modelslive from the app
Biomedical vs Social Model
The biomedical approach to health is doctors, hospitals, drugs and machines: diagnose the disease, treat the patient, then cure or manage it. Across the twentieth century, improvements in medical technology such as vaccines, antibiotics, cardiac surgery, CT and MRI imaging and cancer therapies turned killers into treatable conditions and pushed life expectancy upward. But the approach only switches on once someone is already unwell, so it sits downstream; the social model acts upstream on the living conditions that decide who gets sick in the first place.
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the one idea
why this one carries the topic.
An illustrative life expectancy curve from 1900 to 2020: five medical technologies can be switched on, each bending the curve upward from the decade it arrived, while a dashed curve shows the climb that comes from living conditions alone and an upstream layer marks where the social model acts.
what examiners catch — Students write that biomedical treats and social prevents, with no example. The mark comes from naming a specific technology (antibiotics, MRI, bypass surgery), stating what it allowed doctors to do, linking it to a health status outcome such as higher life expectancy, and then giving a limitation such as cost or not addressing the cause.
what you leave with
five things, not forty.
The biomedical approach focuses on the physical and biological aspects of disease: diagnosis, treatment, cure and management by health professionals.
Improvements in medical technology, such as vaccines, antibiotics, imaging, cardiac surgery and cancer therapies, let once-fatal conditions be treated or managed.
These improvements extended life expectancy and improved quality of life, which is the biomedical approach at its strongest.
The approach is reactive: it acts after illness appears, relies on costly technology and professionals, and does not change the conditions that made people sick.
The social model works upstream on living conditions, so Australia uses both approaches together rather than choosing one.
what's underneath
nothing here is a standalone fact.
knowhere maps every concept to what it rests on and what rests on it — 2 underneath this one, 2 built on top. Each one says why, in a sentence, not as an arrow on a diagram.
this conceptbiomedical vs social modelAn illustrative life expectancy curve from 1900 to 2020: five medical technologies can be switched on, each bending the curve upward from the decade it arrived, while a dashed curve shows the climb that comes from living conditions alone and an upstream layer marks where the social model acts.
sits under itold and new public healthbecause the history explains why both models exist
sits under ithealth status indicatorsbecause Life expectancy is the health status measure the curve tracks
built on itlevels of preventionbecause Each prevention level maps onto one of the two models, so students need the models first.
built on itthe social model of healthbecause the contrast before the deep dive
the rest of health promotion models
4 more, same treatment.
Each one is its own knowscape in the app — built for how a particular student takes things in, not one explanation handed to everybody.
levels of preventionin the appottawa charter action areasin the appthe social model of healthin the appold and new public healthin the app
this is one of 865
they don't read it. they run it.
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