This engaging and accessible reader takes a social problems approach to health and medicine, providing a broad and critical lens on contemporary health problems. Designed for courses on social problems and on medical sociology, the volume embraces two fundamental principles: that health and illness are at least partly socially produced, and that health care is not an unfettered good and often brings with it serious social problems. The volume is organized into six sections, addressing the medicalization of human problems; the social construction of health problems; social movements; gender; race and class and the provision of health care; and medical accountability. Taken together, the essays demonstrate the depth and richness of a social problems approach to health and medicine, and the critical perspective it brings to our understanding of health and illness in U.S. society.

This volume deals with the topic of health inequalities and health disparities. The volume is divided into five sections. The first section includes an introductory look at the issue of health care inequalities and disparities and also an introduction to the volume. One of the backdrops to this topic in the United States was The National Healthcare Disparities Report and its focus on the ability of Americans to access health care and variation in the quality of care. Disparities related to socioeconomic status were included, as were disparities linked to race and ethnicity and the report also tried to explore the relationship between race/ethnicity and socioeconomic position, as explained in more detail in the first article in the book. The second article discusses a newer overall approach to issues related to health inequalities and health disparities.
The remaining four sections of the book address more specific topics relating to inequalities and disparities. The second section examines racial and ethnic inequalities and disparities. The third section includes articles that address the issue from the perspective of research about health care providers and health care facilities. The last two sections of the book focus on consumers and topics of health care disparities, with Section 4 focused on issues related to substance abuse, mental health and related concerns. Section 5 includes articles looking at issues of vulnerable women, women with breast cancer and people with colorectal cancer.
Inequalities and Disparities in Health Care and Health is important reading for medical sociologists and people working in other social science disciplines studying health-related issues.The volume also provides vital information for health services researchers, policy analysts and public health researchers.
* A great resource for health services researchers, policy analysts and public health researchers
* An in-depth look at bioethics, focussing on health inequalities and disparities

Finalist, C. Wright Mills Award, Society for the Study of Social Problems

Drinking during pregnancy has come to be considered a pervasive social problem, despite the uncertainties surrounding the epidemiology and etiology of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS).

Sociologist Elizabeth M. Armstrong traces the evolution of medical knowledge about the effects of alcohol on fetal development from nineteenth-century debates about drinking and heredity to the modern diagnosis of FAS and its kindred syndromes. She argues that issues of race, class, and gender have influenced medical findings about alcohol and reproduction and that these findings have always reflected broader social and moral preoccupations -- in particular, concerns about a woman's role and place in society. Medical beliefs about drinking during pregnancy have often ignored the poverty, chaos, and insufficiency of some women's lives -- factors that may be more responsible than alcohol for adverse outcomes in babies and children.

"Armstrong draws attention to some important questions about our perceptions of responsibility for alcohol-related harm sustained during pregnancy... I hope that her book will lead to a healthy debate and a more objective ethical, medical, and scientific approach to this field in the future." -- Addiction

"There is much to admire in Armstrong's account: her clever deconstruction of the advocates' invented history of FAS, her sure-handed discussion of the politics of reproduction, and her often fascinating interview material." -- Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

"In this well-written book, Armstrong provides an in-depth analysis of fetal alcohol syndrome as a social problem." -- AmericanJournal of Sociology

"A well-researched, highly readable, and convincing example of the ways in which modern medicine continues to create myths, stigmatize the poor, and pathologize gender." -- Social History of Medicine

Elizabeth M. Armstrong is an associate professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University.