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Sociologists have researched the subject of illness behaviour for more than five decades. Recently the discussion has taken on new importance because of changes in the delivery of health care and the emergence of patients' rights and increased patient knowledge of medicine. Through a selective review of the literature on illness behaviour, the paper aims to show that singular and segmented approaches to illness behaviour have not clearly elucidated the complexity of the phenomenon. A more comprehensive and structured analysis of illness behaviour can be accomplished with mixed qualitative and hierarchical/structural quantitative techniques. Following a discussion of prior research in social psychology, demography, economics, social networks and geographic systems, this paper offers a template for future analysis of illness behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While sociologists earlier this century often used insights derived from psychoanalytic theory in their writings, contemporary sociology has largely tended to ignore this body of work. This is as true of medical sociologists as it is of others, despite the fact that the 'founding father' of medical sociology, Talcott Parsons, used psychoanalytic perspectives extensively in his theorising on the social aspects of medicine and health. In this paper I make a case for a return to a medical sociology that incorporates understandings of subjectivity derived from psychoanalytic writings, with particular reference to the medical encounter and the illness experience. The paper begins with an overview of psychoanalytic sociology. I go on to review the major insights Parsons developed in his writings and the work of other writers who have more recently used psychoanalytic theory productively in theorising the sociocultural dimensions of medicine and health care. The paper concludes with some thoughts about future directions for taking up the psychoanalytic perspective in the sociology of health and illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines lay accounts of illness and health gathered - by means of eight focus groups - from people living in two Cantonese-speaking communities in England. The authors concentrate on the manner in which Cantonese speakers recruit and mobilise various agents - such as traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), spirits, demons, food and the weather - to describe and explain aspects of their bodily and mental wellbeing. As well as providing information on what Cantonese speakers say about such matters, the data are also used to indicate how a concentration on 'accounts', rather than on 'beliefs', enables sociology to side-step a concern with the subjective and psychological and to focus, instead, on what is publicly available and verifiable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking as its point of departure the contested nature of the body, in mainstream theory and the sociology of health and illness alike, this paper seeks, albeit tentatively, to chart a critical realist alternative to these debates using the controversial terrain of chronic illness and disability as a case study. A critical realist approach, it is suggested, enables us to: (i) bring the biological body, impaired or otherwise, 'back in'; (ii) relate the individual to society in a challenging, non-conflationary or non 'unidirectional' way; and (iii) rethink questions of identity, difference and the ethics of care through a commitment to real bodies and real selves, real lives and real worlds. Within all this, it is argued, modern medicine does indeed, contra disability theory and postmodern calls for the pursuit of so-called 'arche-health', have a continuing role to play in the mitigation of human pain and suffering, including the realities of chronic disabling illness conditions and the associated 'greying' of Western populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]