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Sociology of Health and Medicine - Abstracts
Sociologyindex, Abstracts, Bibliographies, Syllabus, Journals, Sociology Of Health And Medicine, Sociology Books 2012, Books on Sociology of Health
Innovative
Health Technologies and the Social: Redefining Health, Medicine and the Body
Socioeconomic health inequalities among a nationally representative
sample of Danish adolescents: the role of different types of social relations
Developing,
Integrating and Perpetuating New Ways of Applying Sociology To Health, Medicine, Policy
and Everyday Life
Contemporary
legends, rumours and collective behaviour: some neglected resources for medical sociology?
Theorising Indigenous health: a political economy of health and
substance misuse.
Medicine must change
to serve an ageing society
The
sociology of health promotion: critical analyses of consumption, lifestyle and risk.
Inequalities
in women's health
Governing
the health of the hybrid self: Integrative medicine, neoliberalism, and the shifting
biopolitics of subjectivity
The Balance Between Group and Individual Rights
The Rhetoric
of Health Technology: The Microprocessor Patient Card.
Sociomedical Perspectives
on Patient Care
In
pursuit of health: Pragmatic acculturation in everyday life
Socioeconomic
health inequalities among a nationally representative sample of Danish adolescents: the
role of different types of social relations
P Due1, J Lynch, B Holstein and J Modvig
Objective: To investigate the role of different types of social relations in adolescent
health inequalities.
Design: Cross sectional study. Measures included family social class, indices of social
relations to parents, friends, teachers, and school.
Results: Adolescents from families of lower socioeconomic position reported more physical
and psychological symptoms. This ranged from 40% increased odds for multiple physical
symptoms among less advantaged girls, to 90% increased odds of multiple psychological
symptoms for less advantaged boys. Relationships with friends or teachers showed small
social class differences, while strong and consistent social class differences were found
in the ways adolescents reported their own and their parents relations to school. For
example, girls from families of lower socioeconomic position were more than four times as
likely to report their parents unwilling to attend school meetings (odds ratio=4.54, 95%
confidence intervals: 2.68 to 7.69). Poorer relations with parents, peers, teachers, and
school were all associated with worse health. Patterns of parent-child relations with the
school were the greatest contributors to socioeconomic differences in physical and
psychological symptoms.
Conclusions: The school is one of the first important social institutions directly
experienced by children and socioeconomic differences in how adolescents and their parents
relate to the school may be part of the cascade of early life influences that can lead to
later social and health disadvantage.
Developing,
Integrating and Perpetuating New Ways of Applying Sociology To Health, Medicine, Policy
and Everyday Life
Clair, Jeffrey., Hinote, Brian., Robinson, Caroline. and Wasserman, Jason.
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association,
Abstract: Data for this paper involve a content analysis of a ten-year period (1993-2002)
of JHSB. The content of the articles were examined by substantive area and four foci: (1)
for explicit policy recommendations by the authors; (2) for interdisciplinary approaches
or focus, which would indicate a commitment toward the proliferation of sociology; (3) for
explicit statements of sociology as an applied science, and (4) for indications of
directional shifts within the practice of the discipline. We found that the orientation of
the articles were toward generating research and theory that shy away from policy,
interdisciplinary approaches, and applied clinical issues. Our discussion focuses on what
JHSB is and what it could be. We suggest that JHSB can help generate and nourish new
socio-medical forms of inquiry that can impact the way research questions are framed in
order to maximize the applicability of social scientific evidence to health behavior and
medical practice.
Contemporary
legends, rumours and collective behaviour: some neglected resources for medical sociology?
Dingwall, Robert
Publisher: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Publication Name: Sociology of Health & Illness.
Subject: Sociology and social work ISSN: 0141-9889
Abstract: The "Missing Kidney" contemporary legend describes a person who
visited a nightclub, vanished for a weekend, then reappeared with a kidney having been
surgically removed. This story has been reported as fact in many countries and illustrates
the gap between public understanding and medical science.
Innovative
Health Technologies and the Social: Redefining Health, Medicine and the Body
Andrew Webster
Current Sociology, Vol. 50, No. 3, 443-457 (2002) DOI: 10.1177/0011392102050003009
This paper explores the growth and social implications of what are regarded as highly
innovative technologies in health. Conventional medical sociology and the sociology of
health have had a very uneven engagement with technology, apart from sustained feminist
critique of reproductive technologies. More recent analyses developed within the sociology
of the body and especially in science and technology studies (STS) have provided new
insights into the meaning of health, illness and disease and the way these are mediated by
and changed through technological development. Through an examination of recent work the
paper argues that current sociological analysis points towards a qualitative shift in the
relation between innovative health technologies (IHTs), the body, identity and wider
social processes. These changes are especially linked to two increasingly related IHTs -
genetics and informatics - and the ways that they reconfigure the social boundaries
between the `biological' and the `social' and so between medicine and society. The paper
concludes by discussing the implications for the future research agenda within STS,
especially in terms of the relationship between the social and the technical.
Medicine must change
to serve an ageing society
Eradicate age discrimination and increase resources
Alison Tonks, assistant editor
BMJ 1999 December 4; 319(7223): 1450–1451.
Doctors and those responsible for commissioning and shaping health services have failed to
acknowledge the rapid ageing of most societies. This worldwide phenomena is unprecedented,
leaving us ignorant, fearful, and reluctant to tackle it face on. A conference in London
last month examined how medicine and its institutions must change to serve a growing older
population while still meeting the needs of younger people.
Theorising
Indigenous health: a political economy of health and substance misuse. Health
Sociology Review, Saggers, S. and Gray, D. (2002). 10, (2), pp. 21-32. [RJ380]
Abstract: For more than two decades we have been engaged
in a program of research which examines the health of Indigenous people. More recently
this work has focused on ways in which substance misuse affects communities, and their
responses to it. Our work is framed by understandings derived from political economy,
which directs attention to the web of political and economic relations surrounding
individuals and social groups. We have stressed that this framework should not be
interpreted in a crudely deterministic fashion, which neglects the nuances of the social
determinants of health, or individual and community agency. Much of our recent work
documents such agency in community-based actions throughout Australia. In this paper we
examine Indigenous drinking and its consequences, outline a political economy approach to
drinking, and discuss how this has informed our work. We conclude with a discussion of
some criticisms of this approach and our responses.
The Balance Between Group and
Individual Rights
Sociology 318 - Northern Arizona University
Anne Diedrich
We live in a world of billions of people. Everyday, everything we do affects others. This
is especially true with health behaviors. When someone chooses to smoke their smoke then
affects the people around them as they inhale it. The health choices that a pregnant woman
makes always affect the health of her baby. Individual behaviors affect the group that the
individual is in in many ways. Does this affect mean that there should be regulation of
individual behaviors? Do the rights of the group outweigh the rights of the individual?
What is the balance between group and individual rights? These are all hard questions to
answer.
Inequalities in women's health
The research has examined the factors influencing women's health, highlighting the extent
to which paid employment for women is a source of health benefit or role strain. Women's
health is shown to be influenced by their marital and parental roles, their participation
in paid employment, and material circumstances, such as their class and housing tenure.
This work has compared women's health in Britain, Finland, Sweden and Norway, contrasting
the different levels of employment participation of women in each society. The research
has also examined whether women's own occupational class or their husband's class is more
closely associated with their health status. This research is based on the secondary
analysis of large government survey data. - soc.surrey.ac.uk/research/12.html
Governing
the health of the hybrid self: Integrative medicine, neoliberalism, and the shifting
biopolitics of subjectivity
Fries, Christopher J
Article from Health Sociology Review Article - December 1, 2008
Abstract: This paper employs a Foucauldian perspective on the shifting spacialisation of
medical knowledge to explore the manner in which integrative medicine is discursively
represented by its biomedical architects so as to ensure good cultural fit with neoliberal
strategies of governance amid the development of transnational global cultural flows in
which human subjectivity has itself hybridized, provoking this reconfiguration of medical
knowledge. It is argued that integrative medicine represents an expansion of medical
rationality into all domains of human life: biological, psychological, sociological, and
spiritual.
The
Rhetoric of Health Technology: The Microprocessor Patient Card.
Author(s):
Godin, B.. Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to integrate rhetorical studies into the
sociology of technology by showing how the use of discourse to enroll actors in a health
technology - ideas.uqam.ca/ideas/data/Papers/fthuqamcr96-01.html
Sociomedical Perspectives on
Patient Care
Jeffrey Michael Clair and Richard M. Allman; eds.: Lexington, Kentucky: University Press
of Kentucky; 1993. $36.00. Review: Odin W. Anderson - annals.org
The physician-patient relationship has been an inherent problem throughout the history of
medicine and has never been fully resolved. Currently, the relationship is made even more
problematic by the proliferation of specialties, the various medical service
organizations, and the rising costs driven by technology.
Single and collaborative authors have written 14 separate chapters on the
physician-patient relationship, with topics ranging from reconciling the agendas of
physicians and patients to fear of malpractice litigation. Chapters have been written
exclusively for this book by eminent medical sociologists and are of uniformly high
quality. The chapters are intended for practicing clinicians but should also serve a wider
readership.
The authors encourage clinicians to incorporate principles of history-taking into their
practices and to pay increased attention to factors in their patients' lives beyond
specific biological and chemical variables. One chapter is aptly named "High Tech vs.
High Touch" and deals with the effect of technology on patient care. The advice is:
Do more talking and possibly less testing.
The two authors of the last chapter, who attempt to give an overview of the preceding
chapters, are a professional administrator and executive and a practicing clinician in a
big medical center. They are sympathetic to the medical sociologists who wish to add to an
already overloaded 4-year medical curriculum and agree in principle with the advice given
in "High Tech vs. High Touch." Their counter-advice is: "There is a great
need for those who would undertake social medicine as a field of scholarly endeavor to
develop an early and deep understanding of the structure and organization of the health
care system. How do the parts fit? How did they get that way? What are the flows of
authority and responsibility, power, and money? How do things look from the inside as well
as the outside?" The authors note: "We must recognize that time for training is
both limited and jammed full and that, once in practice, time is the physician's only item
of exchange." The bibliography on the subject is exhaustive, comprising 32 pages, and
the index is detailed.
The medical sociologists are in somewhat the same position as Henry Higgins, the linguist
in My Fair Lady who was falling in love against his will with Eliza Doolittle. He
wondered, "Why can't a woman be like a man?" Medical sociologists seem to be
saying: "Why can't doctors be like medical sociologists?"
The
sociology of health promotion: critical analyses of consumption, lifestyle and risk.
Bunton, R., Nettleton, S., Burrows, R.
Abstract: Health promotion as a topic worthy of study in itself has so far mainly escaped
the predations of sociologists: their services have been confined to uses within health
promotion (lifestyle surveys etc.). This collection of papers from a 1993 conference
therefore throws a welcome critical spotlight on what is still a new phenomenon: the term
'health promotion' has only come into use in the past ten years.
The chapter by Richard Parish provides a useful review of the development of health
promotion in its institutional context-away from the emphasis on the individual to a
collective responsibility highlighted in the main policy initiatives.
Michael Kelly and Bruce Charlton demonstrate the range of tensions among the various
health promotion philosophies: between the holistic notion of health that rejects the
purely medical model and the 'health for all' strategy vested in scientific thinking. As
they conclude: 'For all the talk of empowerment, the experts remain firmly in control.'
This theme is further explored by Charlie Davison and George Davey Smith, who show that
the traditional left/right views of health-freedom of choice (to make unhealthy choices)
or social determinism (through poverty and class)-tend to converge in a critique that
shows health promotion to be both over-simplified and to ignore the 'clash of cultures';
how public perceptions, priorities and attitudes towards health are at odds with those of
health promoters.
Health promotion has tended to be short on theory and strong on practice and creativity,
no doubt partly owing to the fact that its practitioners lack formal training but come
from allied professions such as nursing and teaching. That the contradictions are not
often acknowledged comes out well in the two chapters on accidents; the professional
'assumption' is that they are caused by negligence and are all preventable, while the
'lay' view is that they arise from fate, bad luck or chance. As there is no such thing as
an 'ideal' accident, it is of little surprise that studies show the minimal impact of
educational interventions.
The most glaring omission from the book is discussion of the impact of HIV and AIDS (apart
from a brief paper on dentistry), surely the major influence on the growth in health
promotion, if only because of its high profile and funding. Yet as it has received so much
attention in other social science publications, its omission is perhaps permissible here.
The impact of the media on sustaining ideas of 'lifestyle' can lead health promotion to be
seen as consumer-led rather than provider- or policy-led. Any non-sociologists put off by
the sociospeak that pervades some of the contributions are sure to enjoy Barry Glassner's
chapter on cosmetic surgery and weight watchers in the USA. It shows the trivial impact of
mainstream health promotion activities in the face of the $5000 million US plastic surgery
industry.
This book will be useful for health-promotion officers, managers and planners to dip into
in order to shake up their ideas. As health is too often viewed by health-promotion
practitioners as controllable, predictable, calculable (and therefore preventable), more
such critiques of health promotion are required, if only to act as a corrective to some of
the more utopian claims. Health promoters need to explore the ambiguity of much of their
work if they are to be less dogmatic and susceptible to populist criticism. - D. Williams
- cababstractsplus.org
In
pursuit of health: Pragmatic acculturation in everyday life
Quah, Stella R
Article from:Health Sociology Review Article date:December 1, 2008
When disease strikes the most immediate reaction is to seek a solution: How to stop this?
How to get well again? Then comes the intriguing part: How did I get this problem, and why
me? Research findings in medical sociology and anthropology over the past five to six
decades show these to be virtually primordial questions, irrespective of geographical
location, lifestyle, and ethnic, religious, linguistic or other background. While the
questions tend to be the same, the answers vary widely, as they are fashioned precisely by
people's location, way of life, socio-cultural, religious, linguistic, and other
differences.
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