Essay on Yes Ma'am

Submitted By Lemur21
Words: 1062
Pages: 5

In chapter four the topic was health and illness. In the first part of the chapter it talked about how do you define health. The book described health basically as a when a person can do functions or tasks that they want to do without any issues. While reading this I thought to myself how much I take this for granted. My description of health prior to this would have been exercising and eating healthy daily. Before this chapter I only thought that being healthy encompassed the lifestyle that comes with it and not just he bare essentials that make these things possible. I came to realize how fortunate many of us are because we can think clearly and have good motor skills to execute simple tasks. There are many people in the world that are not as lucky as many of us and I believe that I have taken this for granted for a long time. Later in the chapter it talked about how as people we react differently to being sick. Many people react like they cannot do anything and that they are going to die even though it might be a small illness. I have always been a person that fights through sickness because as a child my mother would not allow me to leave the house to play outside or do anything if I did not go to school and this was worse punishment than anything I could imagine. The fact that I could not go to practice or even play outside was far worse then feeling awful and sick in my bed because I had to go outside or else I felt even worse. In high school I did not miss one class from a sickness even if I felt awful because I knew my mom would not allow me to go to practice or go outside to play. I believe that parents are far too easy, in todays times, when it comes to kids being sick because the kids are so manipulative and the parents just do not want to deal with them. There are tons of children out there that miss class because they fake an illness and then they just play video games all day which is a privilege and much better than school. Chapter 5 was about health traditions and how different cultures and eras reacted and explained illnesses. There was one part where the book talked about folk medicine and how in that time period they explained choking. This part of the book was one of the stranger things that I read and the book described choking in these times was because of spirits and witches. This section really made me question why would these people blame choking on witches and spirits when it seems logical to use deduction to figure out that someone is choking from so type of food or they were strangled. I think that these choking stories might have been created to protect men from when they choked their wives or other people. These traditions were put in place to make sure that if a man lost his temper or became out of control, the people in his community could blame a strangle death on witches and spirits rather than the guilty man that did it. In chapter 8 it talked about the effects of religious beliefs on healthcare and I had never known much about Mormonism so I took quite an interest in learning about it. Mormons believe strongly in child bearing because they must "replenish the earth". Mormons care a lot about giving birth and having more children so they almost always give births at hospitals and go to monthly checkups. Also, the household duties of the mother are taken over by other parts of the family after birth so that she can care for the baby to make sure it is healthy and nourished to the best of her ability. I like how mormonism really does care about there children and how they keep such good care of them when they are first born. It seems that there is little child neglect when it comes to Mormonism because