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Social medicine, starting two centuries ago, has shown that social
conditions affect health and illness more than biology does, and
social change affects the outcomes of health and illness more than
health services do. Understanding and exposing sickness-generating
structures in society helps us change them. This first book
providing a critical introduction to social medicine sheds light on
an increasingly important field. The authors draw on examples
worldwide to show how principles based on solidarity and mutual aid
have enabled people to participate collaboratively to construct
health-promoting social conditions. The book offers vital
information and analysis to enhance our understanding regarding the
promotion of health through social and individual means; the
micro-politics of medical encounters; the social determination of
illness; the influences of racism, class, gender, and ethnicity on
health; health and empire; and health praxis, reform, and
sociomedical activism. Illustrations are included throughout the
book to convey these key themes and important issues, as well as on
Routledge's webpage for the book, under the Support Materials tab.
The authors offer compelling ways to understand and to change the
social dimensions of health and health care. Students, teachers,
practitioners, activists, policy makers, and people concerned about
health and health care will value this book, which goes beyond the
usual approaches of texts in public health, medical sociology,
health economics, and health policy.
Since the appearance of Waitzkin's The Second Sickness, a landmark
book of the 1980s, American medicine has been dramatically
transformed. Waitzkin's earlier edition used qualitative research
to take readers inside the "black box" of medical decision making.
This new, fully updated and expanded edition retains the earlier
edition's vivid approach and adds timely analysis of how managed
care and other economic and social forces influence medical
practice today.
The recent financial meltdown has brought notable changes to the
global practice of health care changes that have often escaped the
American news media. Although Western managed-care corporations
previously had strengthened their influence abroad, now many
countries are considering new approaches to health care for their
citizens.The untold story of how corporations have influenced
global health care and the impacts now in America as the system
rapidly shifts is Dr. Waitzkin s subject in his provocative new
book. We now live in a new era in which the prospects for more
humane approaches to health care are taking root. Strengthening
access and improving public health are at the heart of the many
previously little-noted struggles and actions by individuals,
groups, and whole nations to put control back in the hands of
patients and practitioners, as Americans of many political stripes
seem to universally seek. The impacts of these changes in the
United States are considerable, and they are amply illustrated by
Dr. Waitzkin as the United States attempts to reorient its own
system of care.Selected as the 2012 winner of the Freidson
Outstanding Publication Award by the American Sociological
Association for its "bold and timely analysis of the global
political economy of contemporary crises in health and medical
care. By presenting the lessons learned from social medicine (past
and present), [it] outlines a macro-sociologically informed
response to these crises.""
The recent financial meltdown has brought notable changes to the
global practice of health care changes that have often escaped the
American news media. Although Western managed-care corporations
previously had strengthened their influence abroad, now many
countries are considering new approaches to health care for their
citizens.The untold story of how corporations have influenced
global health care and the impacts now in America as the system
rapidly shifts is Dr. Waitzkin s subject in his provocative new
book. We now live in a new era in which the prospects for more
humane approaches to health care are taking root. Strengthening
access and improving public health are at the heart of the many
previously little-noted struggles and actions by individuals,
groups, and whole nations to put control back in the hands of
patients and practitioners, as Americans of many political stripes
seem to universally seek. The impacts of these changes in the
United States are considerable, and they are amply illustrated by
Dr. Waitzkin as the United States attempts to reorient its own
system of care.Selected as the 2012 winner of the Freidson
Outstanding Publication Award by the American Sociological
Association for its "bold and timely analysis of the global
political economy of contemporary crises in health and medical
care. By presenting the lessons learned from social medicine (past
and present), [it] outlines a macro-sociologically informed
response to these crises.""
Social medicine, starting two centuries ago, has shown that social
conditions affect health and illness more than biology does, and
social change affects the outcomes of health and illness more than
health services do. Understanding and exposing sickness-generating
structures in society helps us change them. This first book
providing a critical introduction to social medicine sheds light on
an increasingly important field. The authors draw on examples
worldwide to show how principles based on solidarity and mutual aid
have enabled people to participate collaboratively to construct
health-promoting social conditions. The book offers vital
information and analysis to enhance our understanding regarding the
promotion of health through social and individual means; the
micro-politics of medical encounters; the social determination of
illness; the influences of racism, class, gender, and ethnicity on
health; health and empire; and health praxis, reform, and
sociomedical activism. Illustrations are included throughout the
book to convey these key themes and important issues, as well as on
Routledge's webpage for the book, under the Support Materials tab.
The authors offer compelling ways to understand and to change the
social dimensions of health and health care. Students, teachers,
practitioners, activists, policy makers, and people concerned about
health and health care will value this book, which goes beyond the
usual approaches of texts in public health, medical sociology,
health economics, and health policy.
Health care professionals, activists and scholars weigh in on how
the U.S. can address the shortcomings of the "medical industrial
complex" and extend affordable health care to all "I've still got
my health so what do I care?" goes a lyric in an old Cole Porter
song. Most of us, in fact, assume we can't live full lives, or take
on life's challenges, without also assuming that we're basically
healthy and will be for the foreseeable future. But these days, our
health and well-being are sorted through an ever-expanding,
profit-seeking financial complex that monitors, controls, and
commodifies our very existence. Given that our access to competent,
affordable health care grows more precarious each day, the arrival
of Health Care Under the Knife could not be more timely. In this
empowering book, noted health-care professionals, scholars, and
activists--including editor Howard Waitzkin--impart their inside
knowledge of the medical system: what's wrong, how it got this way,
and what we can do to heal it. The book is comprised of individual
essays addressing the "medical industrial complex," the impact of
privatization and cutbacks under neoliberalism, the nature of
health-care work, and the intersections between health care and
imperialism, both historically and at present. We see how the
health of our bodies in "developed" countries is tied to the health
of the bodies of the labor force in the Global South, and how the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are linked
strangely, inextricably, to our physical well-being. But this
analysis would not be complete without the book's final section,
which delivers invaluable guidance for how to change this system.
Recounting case studies and successful efforts for creating a more
humane community, this book ultimately gives us hope that our
health-care system can be rescued and made an integral part of a
new and radically different society.
Health care professionals, activists and scholars weigh in on how
the U.S. can address the shortcomings of the medical industrial
complex and extend affordable health care to all "I've still got my
health so what do I care?" goes a lyric in an old Cole Porter song.
Most of us, in fact, assume we can't live full lives, or take on
life's challenges, without also assuming that we're basically
healthy and will be for the foreseeable future. But these days, our
health and well-being are sorted through an ever-expanding,
profit-seeking financial complex that monitors, controls, and
commodifies our very existence. Given that our access to competent,
affordable health care grows more precarious each day, the arrival
of Health Care Under the Knife could not be more timely. In this
empowering book, noted health-care professionals, scholars, and
activists--including editor Howard Waitzkin--impart their inside
knowledge of the medical system: what's wrong, how it got this way,
and what we can do to heal it. The book is comprised of individual
essays addressing the "medical industrial complex," the impact of
privatization and cutbacks under neoliberalism, the nature of
health-care work, and the intersections between health care and
imperialism, both historically and at present. We see how the
health of our bodies in "developed" countries is tied to the health
of the bodies of the labor force in the Global South, and how the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are linked
strangely, inextricably, to our physical well-being. But this
analysis would not be complete without the book's final section,
which delivers invaluable guidance for how to change this system.
Recounting case studies and successful efforts for creating a more
humane community, this book ultimately gives us hope that our
health-care system can be rescued and made an integral part of a
new and radically different society.
The complaints that patients bring to their doctors often have
roots in social issues that involve work, family life, gender roles
and sexuality, aging, substance use; or other problems of
nonmedical origin. In this book, physician/sociologist Howard
Waitzkin examines interactions between patients and doctors to show
how physicians' focus on physical complaints often fails to address
patients' underlying concerns and also reinforces the societal
problems that cause or aggravate these maladies. A progressive
doctor-patient relationship, Waitzkin argues, fosters social
change. Waitzkin provides a pathbreaking analysis of medical
encounters, applying perspectives from structuralism,
post-structuralism, and critical literary theory to transcripts of
recorded conversations between doctors and patients. He
demonstrates how doctors unintentionally maintain dominance in
their dealings with patients, encourage conforming social behavior
and attitudes, and marginalize patients' concerns with social
problems. Waitzkin urges physicians to attend to the social as well
as the medical problems that emerge from patients' narratives and
suggests ways to restructure the manner in which patients and
doctors communicate with each other. Physicians and patients, for
example, should work together to demystify medical discourse,
should refrain from medicalizing social problems through
medications or reassurances that dull socially caused pain, and
should be prepared to call on advocacy organizations seeking to
change the social conditions that create personal distress. This
book will influence and challenge physicians scholars, and students
in the social sciences and humanities, as well as anyone concerned
about the present problems and future direction of medicine.
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