Psy 210 - Psychology and Health Problems

Psychology and Health Problems

By; Donna Shelby

October 10, 2011

Instructor;

Andy Gauler

PSY/210

The multifactorial model is the belief that health and illness are a function of multiple factors involving the interactions of biological, psychological, and cultural domains, (Nevid, 2005). There are a lot of different reasons why some people become ill and other people maintain their health and why some people can catch every little bug that goes around while other people hardly ever get sick. Behavior, personality, sociocultural factors, environmental factors, and stressors all play roles in health and wellness and illnesses. A lot of health problems are affected by things like attitude, behavior, and emotions. The multifactorial model allows psychologist to diagnosis by helping the doctor break down the actual causes of a patient's illness. It is a combination of multiple factors. This also allows the doctor to diagnose and treat patients based on specifics of their individual illness. The multifactorial module uses sociocultural factors that are connected with health and illness, as reflected in human diversity. These factors include ethnicity, level of education, gender and socioeconomic status.

There are a lot of factors that help not only a psychologist but doctors as well determine why certain people are ill more than others. There are biological factors which include family history, our immune system, exposure to germs, medical history and so on. There is not too much you can do about the biological factors but you can try to influence some of them. For example, just going and getting immunizations, exposure to certain germs and moderators of stress. Managing conditions would be a help at changing the outcome of your health whether it be bad or good. Sociocultural factors also help doctors tell what influences our health. Things like a college course, size of family, access to quality health care by having health insurance, conflict, transportation and religion will also affect our health. There is government assistance and free clinics that will help you find health insurance. Environmental factors such as pollution, radiation, carbon monoxide, water quality, sanitation, and natural disasters like hurricanes can also influence health problems. For example during hurricanes there are a lot of healthy people who become sick because of the environmental factors. Personality has a huge influence on an individual's health. Factors such as psychological conflicts, failures, the loss of control, being introverted, and feeling depressed will all affect your health and wellness. People choose their own personality that they want so it can be changed. One could go from being pessimistic to optimistic, and accept the responsibility for the choices and actions that they have taken in life and deal with it to become a better person. These factors are not like biological factors because they're not all genetic. Behavior is also a big influence on our health. People either eating too much or too little, binging, not getting enough sleep, over exercising, and much more can affect your health. For example if you are drunk and decide to drive home, you could get into an accident and injure yourself or someone else. Stress is another cause of health problems, but by moderating stress we can learn to live