Search

This is a detailed analysis of how understanding of health management past, present and future has transformed in the digital age. Since the mid-20th century, we have witnessed ‘healthy'lifestyles being pushed as part of health promotion strategies, both via the state, and through health tracking tools, and narratives of wellness online. This marks a seismic shift from a public welfare state responsibility for health towards individualised practices of digital self-care. Today health has become representative of ‘lifestyle correction'which is performed on social media. Putting the spotlight on neoliberalism and digital technology as pervasive tools that dictate wellness as a moral obligation, Rachael Kent critically analyses how users navigate relationships between self-tracking technologies, social media, and everyday health management.

Attention and Responsibility in Global Health shows the construction of health through what is neglected and how the label of neglect is used to make the case that a shift in attitudes towards tropical diseases is based on changing policy practices of health and disease.Tropical diseases have moved from being of high importance for European empires to being neglected and unknown, and then returning to the spotlight once again. During this process, the understanding, framing, and overall character of the disease grouping has changed through a rediscovery of a health issue once rendered neglectable. The book depicts this change in relevance of tropical diseases from colonial history to the present day diseases across political, cultural, and socio- economic contexts. It shows the transformation of tropical diseases as a grouping that uncovers the changing strategies, tactics, and unintended consequences of advocacy campaigning by scientists, NGOs, and policymakers to drive disease issues up the policy agenda.Drawing on the emergent field of ignorance studies, the book explores ideas about the uses and deployment of both strategic and unintentional'not knowing'. It is aimed at academics and students in science and technology studies, the sociology of health and medicine, environmental sociology, public policy, and the history of science.

Psychiatry has always aimed to peer deep into the human mind, daring to cast light on its darkest corners and untangle its thorniest knots, often invoking the latest medical science in doing so. But, as Owen Whooley's sweeping new book tells us, the history of American psychiatry is really a record of ignorance. On the Heels of Ignorance begins with psychiatry's formal inception in the 1840s and moves through two centuries of constant struggle simply to define and redefine mental illness, to say nothing of the best way to treat it. Whooley's book is no antipsychiatric screed, however; instead, he reveals a field that has muddled through periodic reinventions and conflicting agendas of curiosity, compassion, and professional striving. On the Heels of Ignorance draws from intellectual history and the sociology of professions to portray an ongoing human effort to make sense of complex mental phenomena using an imperfect set of tools, with sometimes tragic results.

Maria Stefani untersucht die Diskrepanz zwischen professioneller Gesundheitskompetenz und dem privaten Gesundheitsverhalten von Pflegefachpersonen. Ausgehend von subjektiven Gesundheitsvorstellungen der Berufsgruppe rekonstruiert sie in Ihrer qualitativen Studie entsprechende soziale Deutungs- und Handlungsmuster in Anlehnung am Deutungsmusterkonzept von Oevermann. Als Ergebnisse formuliert die Autorin eine empirisch begründete Theorie zur Entgrenzung von Pflegeberuf und Privatleben und präsentiert eine handlungsrelevante Typenbildung zum Gesundheitsverhalten. Des Weiteren zeigt sie praktische Implikationen für das Betriebliche Gesundheitsmanagement in der Gesundheits- und Krankenpflege auf. ​

Health care professionals are continually puzzled by people who come to their offices showing no symptoms of physical illness. They are also hard pressed to understand those who, in the face of obvious need of medical help, refuse to seek help. This textbook delves into how interpersonal processes influence the origins, functions, and change of health-related beliefs and attitudes. The authors address such questions as: Why do so many people with nonorganic complaints seek medical aid? Why do so many other people delay getting help despite the presence of medically serious symptoms? How are social networks, such as lay referral systems, linked to the use of medical services? What constitutes the cluster of attitudes called'patient satisfaction,'and how are those attitudes related to actual behavior during treatment (for example, compliance with medical instructions)? What do field experiments suggest with regard to modifying health beliefs and attitudes?

In this intriguing volume, futurist and author Michael G. Zey imagines a time in which technology has stretched human life spans to four hundred years or more. Genetic engineering, cloning, and stem-cell technology will eradicate diseases and allow for nanoscopic repair and maintenance of the body.'Smart drugs'and caloric restriction programs will largely stop aging and ensure healthy bodies and sharp minds indefinitely.Grounding his speculation in contemporary scientific research, Zey's optimistic vision sees retirement replaced by hiatuses between careers, and leisure time spent in multi-generational homes. Key players in the debate include supporters like Cambridge University scientist Aubrey de Grey, who envisions five-thousand-year life spans, and the radical futurist author Ray Kurzweil, who foresees the merging of humans and computers. Organizations such as the Coalition to Extend Life lobby the government for immortality research funding and find opposition in the President's Council on Bioethics and'deep ecologists'advocating zero-population growth.Criticizing current environmental trends as anti-progress and anti-human, Zey's own solutions include controversial measures like human control of weather, colonization of outer space, and genetically modifying food. He concludes that the eventuality of a modern Fountain of Youth is closer than we think. Zey's predictions about the future are thoughtful and fascinating.

Workers in the United States are losing sleep. In the global economy a growing number of employees hold jobs—often more than one at once—with unpredictable hours. Even before the rise of the twenty-four-hour workplace, the relationship between sleep and industry was problematic: sleep is frequently cast as an enemy or a weakness, while constant productivity and flexibility are glorified at the expense of health and safety.Dangerously Sleepy is the first book to track the longtime association of overwork and sleep deprivation from the nineteenth century to the present. Health and labor historian Alan Derickson charts the cultural and political forces behind the overvaluation—and masculinization—of wakefulness in the United States. Since the nineteenth century, men at all levels of society have toiled around the clock by necessity: steel workers coped with rotating shifts, Pullman porters grappled with ever-changing timetables and unrelenting on-call status, and long-haul truckers dealt with chaotic life on the road. But the dangerous realities of exhaustion were minimized and even glamorized when the entrepreneurial drive of public figures such as Thomas Edison and Donald Trump encouraged American men to deny biological need in the name of success. For workers, resisting sleep became a challenge of masculine strength.This lucid history of the wakeful work ethic suggests that for millions of American men and women, untenable work schedules have been the main factor leading to sleep loss, newer ailments such as shift work sleep disorder, and related morbidity and mortality. Dangerously Sleepy places these public health problems in historical context.

This volume examines concepts of disability and wellness in Native American communities, prominently featuring the life's work of Dr. Carol Locust. Authors Locust and Lovern confront the difficulties of translating not only words but also entire concepts between Western and Indigenous cultures, and by increasing the cultural competency of those unfamiliar with Native American ways of being are able to bring readers from both cultures into a more equal dialogue. The three sections contained herein focus on intercultural translation; dialogues with Native American community members; and finally a discussion of being in the world gently as caregivers.

In contemporary manifestations of public health rituals and events, people are being increasingly united around what they hold in common—their material being and humanity. As a cult of humanity, public health provides a moral force in society that replaces ‘traditional'religions in times of great diversity or heterogeneity of peoples, activities and desires. This is in contrast to public health's foundation in science, particularly the science of epidemiology. The rigid rules of ‘scientific evidence'used to determine the cause of illness and disease can work against the most vulnerable in society by putting sectors of the population, such as underrepresented workers, at a disadvantage. This study focuses on this tension between traditional science and the changing vision articulated within public health (and across many disciplines) that calls for a collective response to uncontrolled capitalism and unremitting globalization, and to the way in which health inequalities and their association with social inequalities provides a political rhetoric that calls for a new redistributive social programme. Drawing on decades of research, the author argues that public health is both a cult and a science of contemporary society.

Over the course of a single generation, without significant discussion or debate, a key practice of traditional medicine was almost completely abandoned in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. K. Codell Carter's book describes how and why bloodletting was abandoned, noting that it was part of a process in which innovation was required so that modern scientific medicine could begin. This book is a masterful study on the collapse of a traditional medical practice. Bloodletting had been a prominent medical therapy in early nineteenth-century Europe and can be traced back to Greek and Roman physicians. The Hippocratic corpus contains several discussions of bloodletting. Galen, the most famous physician in classical antiquity, wrote tracts explaining and defending the practice. It was employed in ancient Egypt and is the most commonly mentioned therapy in the Babylonian Talmud. Indeed, it was practiced in virtually every part of the ancient world. Even though the practice abruptly ceased, there was little argument against it or reason to believe it ineffective. In reality, bloodletting actually worked. However, the rise of modern medicine required not just a change in how disease and causation were conceived, but also a change in the role of medicine in society. It has been claimed that the collapse of traditional medicine was a precondition for the rise of modern medicine, but there has been little support for this assertion before now. Carter provides this missing support. The result is a fascinating study in the history of medical practice and social expectations.

Within a variety of practice environments, health professionals often experience feelings of disgust and repulsion towards the presence of an abject object. Cadaverous, sick, disabled bodies, troubled minds, wounds, vomit and so forth are all part of health and care work and threaten the clean and proper bodies of those who undertake it, yet this'unclean'side of health work is rarely accounted for in academic literature. This volume employs the work of Julia Kristeva through a range of case studies drawn from care and nursing settings around the world. It brings together work from researchers and practitioners within the social and health sciences, the caring professions and psychotherapy, to expose and highlight the important impact of the concept of abjection, which historically has been silenced in the health sciences.

USING DISCRETE CHOICE EXPERIMENTS TO VALUE HEALTH AND HEALTH CARE In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the development and application of discrete choice experiments (DCEs) within health economics. The use of this re- tively new instrument to value health and health care has now evolved to the point where a general text for practising professionals seems appropriate. The few existing books in this area are either research monographs or focus almost entirely on more advanced t- ics. By contrast, this book serves as a general reference for those applying the technique to health care for the first time as well as for more experienced practitioners. Thus, the book is relevant to postgraduate students and applied researchers who have an interest in the use of DCEs for valuing health and health care. Contributions are made by a number of leading experts in the field, enabling the book to contain a uniquely rich mix of research applications and methodological developments. Part 1 summarises how DCEs can be implemented, from experimental design to data analysis and the interpretation of results. In many ways, this can be regarded as a crash course on the conduct of DCEs. Extensive reference is made throughout to other sources of literature where the interested reader can find further details. Part 2 presents a series of case studies, illustrating the breadth of applications in health e- nomics.

The studies of the human being in health and illness and how he can be cared for is concerned with more than the biological aspects and thus calls for a broader perspective. Social sciences and medical humanities give insight into the context and conditions of being ill, caring for the ill, and understanding disease in a respective socio-cultural frame. This book brings together scholars from various countries who are interested in deepening the interdisciplinary discourse on the subject. This book is the outcome of the 4th global conference on “Making Sense of: Health, Illness and Disease,” held at Mansfield College, Oxford, in July 2005.This volume will be of interest to students in the medical humanities, researchers as well as health care provider who wish to gain insight into the various perspectives through which we can understand health, illness and disease.It has been brought to our attention that in a chapter in this volume “Media Treatment of Organ Donation: A Case Study in Switzerland” By Peter J. Schulzdirect reference and citation of the works of other scholars is often inconsistent and in some cases totally lacking. While we do not believe that it was the intention of the author of the article to misappropriate other persons'material, we do admit that the chapter does not meet standards currently expected of an academic publication. We regret any misappropriation of another author's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions in our publications and will remain vigilant to prevent this recurring in the future. We give notice that the chapter has been retracted and will not appear in any future editions of the book.Brill, February 2016

This provocative study shows the downside of meritocracy, the equality ideology embrassed by western Europen countries

'With the compelling evidence that more redistributive universal welfare benefits and education provide the main escalator to reducing inequalities, this is a timely and thought-provoking book for all those concerned to reduce our societies'embedded structural inequalities, cumulative disadvantages and health inequalities.'Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health'Unequal Lives is the book that we have all been waiting for. In this skilfully crafted volume, Hilary Graham makes the vital connection between health inequalities and social inequalities in a way that opens up new understandings of both concepts and consequences for policy. Scholarly yet accessible, this is a'must read'book for researchers, policymakers and practitioners alike.'Margaret Whitehead, WH Duncan Professor of Public Health, University of Liverpool, UKWhat is meant by health inequalities and socioeconomic inequalities?What evidence is there to support the link between socioeconomic status and health?Why do these links persist over time, between and within societies, and across people's lives? What part do policies play in the persistence of social and health inequalities?Unequal Lives provides an evidence-based introduction to social and health inequalities. It brings together research from social epidemiology, sociology and social policy to guide the reader to an understanding of why people's lives and people's health remain so unequal, even in rich societies where there is more than enough for all. The book introduces the non-specialist to key concepts like health inequalities and health inequities, social class and socioeconomic position, social determinants and life course, as well as to the key indicators of health and socioeconomic position. It provides a wealth of evidence on socioeconomic inequalities in health at both national and global level, and explores how these inequalities persist as countries industrialise, patterns of employment and family life change, and chronic diseases emerge as the big killers. Consideration is given to policy and its impact on inequalities within the UK, Europe and beyond and an assessment made of health inequalities throughout the life.This new book from best selling author Hilary Graham is of particular interest to students in sociology, social policy, health studies, health promotion and public health as well as to social work and community nursing students and those working in the health and welfare fields.

A timely contribution to the fields of film history, visual cultures, and globalization studies, Cinematic Prophylaxis provides essential historical information about how the representation of biological contagion has affected understandings of the origins and vectors of disease. Kirsten Ostherr tracks visual representations of the contamination of bodies across a range of media, including 1940s public health films; entertainment films such as 1950s alien invasion movies and the 1995 blockbuster Outbreak; television programs in the 1980s, during the early years of the aids epidemic; and the cyber-virus plagued Internet. In so doing, she charts the changes—and the alarming continuities—in popular understandings of the connection between pathologized bodies and the global spread of disease.Ostherr presents the first in-depth analysis of the public health films produced between World War II and the 1960s that popularized the ideals of world health and taught viewers to imagine the presence of invisible contaminants all around them. She considers not only the content of specific films but also their techniques for making invisible contaminants visible. By identifying the central aesthetic strategies in films produced by the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, and other institutions, she reveals how ideas about racial impurity and sexual degeneracy underlay messages ostensibly about world health. Situating these films in relation to those that preceded and followed them, Ostherr shows how, during the postwar era, ideas about contagion were explicitly connected to the global circulation of bodies. While postwar public health films embraced the ideals of world health, they invoked a distinct and deeply anxious mode of representing the spread of disease across national borders.

Experiences of health and illness are fundamental to how we understand ourselves, and the postmodern obsession with body image has made health even more significant in identity formation. The study of subjective experiences of health and illness can also provide a challenge to traditional objective medical knowledge and, given current healthcare interest in user involvement, can highlight the need for change in health service provision.This book explores the interplay between identity and health, private and public, mind and body. Drawing on new material, and using and exploring innovative biographical and narrative methods, it covers a broad range of identities in relation to health and illness, including race, religion, ethnicity, disability, age, body image, sexuality and gender.Identity and Health will be of great interest to academics, researchers and students of sociology, medical anthropology, health and psychology.

Medical texts provide a powerful means of accessing contemporary perceptions of illness and through them assumptions about the nature of the body and identity. By mapping these perceptions, from their nineteenth-century focus on illness located in a biological body through to their'discovery'of the psycho-social patient of the late twentieth century, a history of identity, both physical and psychological, is revealed.

Cancer is that “loathsome beast, which seized upon the breast, drove its long claws into the surrounding tissues, derived its sustenance by sucking out the juices of its victims, and never even relaxed its hold in death,” a turn-of-the-century physician recorded. Even today cancer affects the popular imagination with dread. In a subtle and penetrating cultural history, James Patterson examines reactions to the disease through a century of American life.The modern American preoccupation with cancer was apparent during the widely publicized illness and death from that ailment of Ulysses S. Grant in 1885. Awareness of the disease soon figured heavily in the public consciousness, and individual reactions to it continue to reveal broader tensions within American society. Patterson examines responses to cancer by researchers and physicians, quacks and faith healers, by the multitude who have heard sensational media reports of “cures,” as well as by many who have had firsthand experiences with the disease.Optimistic attitudes of many experts contrast sharply with the skepticism of large segments of the population—often the less wealthy and the less educated—that reject the claims of medical science and resist the advice or, some argue, the paternalistic dictates of the government-supported cancer research establishment.Expanding expectations of a cure from a confident medical profession; the rise of a government-supported Cancer Establishment managing a large research empire; the emergence of a “cancer counterculture”; a new emphasis on prevention through control of the environment and the self; and the private fears and pessimism of millions of Americans form a telling history of American social patterns. Whether the issue is smoking, pollution, or regular checkups, attitudes toward cancer reflect more general views on medicine, public policy, and illness, as well as on death and dying. This century has witnessed both a biomedical revolution and a vastly increased role of the state in the private lives of citizens; but not everyone has bought the medical package, and many have little faith in government intervention.Readers interested in the cultural dimensions of science and medicine as well as historians, sociologists, and political scientists will be enlightened and challenged by The Dread Disease.

From the castigation and stigmatization of victims of AIDS to our celebration of diet, exercise and fitness, the moral categorization of health and disease reflects contemporary notions that disease results from moral failure and that health is the representation of moral triumph. Ranging across academic disciplines and historical time periods, the essays in Morality andHealth offer a compelling assessment of the powerful role of moral systems for judging the complex questions of risk and responsibility for disease, the experience of illness, and social and cultural responses to those who are sick. Contributors include Keith Thomas, Charles Rosenberg, Richard Shweder, Arthur Kleinman, David Mechanic, Nancy Tomes and Linda Gordon.

What is a `healthy'lifestyle? Which is more significant: the social circumstances in which people live, or lifestyle habits such as exercise or smoking?Health and Lifestyles is the first description of a large and representative survey of the British population asking just those questions. It examines the findings, and considers issues such as measured fitness, declared health, psychological status, life circumstances, health-related behaviour, attitudes and beliefs. Providing firm evidence of the importance of social circumstances and patterns of health-related behaviour, Health and Lifestyles is an important contribution to current debate, revealing the levels of inequality in health in Britain today.