Assignment on Disability Models

Assignment on Main Models of Disability

There are 2 main models of disability, namely the Social model and the Medical model. This section of the study describes the two models in detail:

Medical model of Disability

The medical model defines disability as the state of medical illness. It considers disability as a person’s problem. It regards disabled people as dependent and who require medical treatments in order to get cured. Medical model also validates the way in which the disable people have been scientifically keeping out of the society.According to this model, the disabled people are a problem and not the part of the society. The medical model is classified into two distinctive terms that are disability and impairments. Disability is referred to an inability of a person to perform a certain action in the line of attack that is considered to be normal for a healthy person. On the other hand, Impairment is referred to any kind of deformity or loss of anatomical, psychosomatic and physiological function and structure.

The medical model of disability basically focuses on the actions that cannot be performed by a person. For example according to medical model a person suffering from injury cannot comfortably walk on his own and is therefore termed as a wheelchair user. Likewise, a person suffering from any kind of disability is not able to go up or down on stairs or read information that is printed in standard size format. According to medical model a disabled person is incapable of speaking in a normal manner as other healthy people do.