The extensively updated and revised third edition of the bestselling Social Medicine Reader provides a survey of the challenging issues facing today's health care providers, patients, and caregivers with writings by scholars in medicine, the social sciences, and the humanities.
The extensively updated and revised third edition of the bestselling Social Medicine Reader provides a survey of the challenging issues facing today's health care providers, patients, and caregivers by bringing together moving narratives of illness, commentaries by physicians, debates about complex medical cases, and conceptually and empirically based writings by scholars in medicine, the social sciences, and the humanities. Volume 1, Ethics and Cultures of Biomedicine, contains essays, case studies, narratives, fiction, and poems that focus on the experiences of illness and of clinician-patient relationships. Among other topics the contributors examine the roles and training of professionals alongside the broader cultures of biomedicine; health care; experiences and decisions regarding death, dying, and struggling to live; and particular manifestations of injustice in the broader health system. The Reader is essential reading for all medical students, physicians, and health care providers.
To meet the needs of the rapidly changing world of health care, future physicans and health care providers will need to be trained to become wiser scientists and humanists in order to understand the social and moral as well as technological aspects of health and illness. The Social Medicine Reader is designed to meet this need. Based on more than a decade of teaching social medicine to first-year medical students at the pioneering Department of Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina, The Social Medicine Reader defines the meaning of the social medicine perspective and offers an approach for teaching it. Looking at medicine from a variety of perspectives, this anthology features fiction, medical reports, scholarly essays, poetry, case studies, and personal narratives by patients and doctors--all of which contribute to an understanding of how medicine and medical practice is profoundly influenced by social, cultural, political, and economic forces. What happens when a person becomes a patient? How are illness and disability experienced? What causes disease? What can medicine do? What constitutes a doctor/patient relationship? What are the ethical obligations of a health care provider? These questions and many others are raised by The Social Medicine Reader, which is organized into sections that address how patients experience illness, cultural attitudes toward disease, social factors related to health problems, the socialization of physicians, the doctor/patient relationship, health care ethics and the provider's role, medical care financing, rationing, and managed care.
Duke University Press is pleased to announce the second edition of the bestselling Social Medicine Reader. The Reader provides a survey of the challenging issues facing today’s health care providers, patients, and caregivers by bringing together moving narratives of illness, commentaries by physicians, debates about complex medical cases, and conceptually and empirically based writings by scholars in medicine, the social sciences, and the humanities. The first edition of The Social Medicine Reader was a single volume. This significantly revised and expanded second edition is divided into three volumes to facilitate use by different audiences with varying interests. Praise for the 3-volume second edition of The Social Medicine Reader: “A superb collection of essays that illuminate the role of medicine in modern society. Students and general readers are not likely to find anything better.”—Arnold S. Relman, Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School Praise for the first edition: “This reviewer strongly recommends The Social Medicine Reader to the attention of medical educators.”—Samuel W. Bloom, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association Volume 3: Over the past four decades the American health care system has witnessed dramatic changes in private health insurance, campaigns to enact national health insurance, and the rise (and perhaps fall) of managed care. Bringing together seventeen pieces new to this second edition of The Social Medicine Reader and four pieces from the first edition, Health Policy, Markets, and Medicine draws on a broad range of disciplinary perspectives—including political science, economics, history, and bioethics—to consider changes in health care and the future of U.S. health policy. Contributors analyze the historical and moral foundation of today’s policy debates, examine why health care spending is so hard to control in the United States, and explain the political dynamics of Medicare and Medicaid. Selections address the rise of managed care, its impact on patients and physicians, and the ethical implications of applying a business ethos to medical care; they also compare the U.S. health care system to the systems in European countries, Canada, and Japan. Additional readings probe contemporary policy issues, including the emergence of consumer-driven health care, efforts to move quality of care to the top of the policy agenda, and the implications of the aging of America for public policy. Contributors: Henry J. Aaron, Drew E. Altman, George J. Annas, Robert H. Binstock, Thomas Bodenheimer, Troyen A. Brennan, Robert H. Brook, Lawrence D. Brown, Daniel Callahan, Jafna L. Cox, Victor R. Fuchs, Kevin Grumbach, Rudolf Klein, Robert Kuttner, Larry Levitt, Donald L. Madison, Wendy K. Mariner, Elizabeth A. McGlynn, Jonathan Oberlander, Geov Parrish, Sharon Redmayne, Uwe E. Reinhardt, Michael S. Sparer, Deborah Stone
In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.
A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities brings together articles from the key theoretical approaches in the field of medical anthropology as well as related science and technology studies. The editors’ comprehensive introductions evaluate the historical lineages of these approaches and their value in addressing critical problems associated with contemporary forms of illness experience and health care. Presents a key selection of both classic and new agenda-setting articles in medical anthropology Provides analytic and historical contextual introductions by leading figures in medical anthropology, medical sociology, and science and technology studies Critically reviews the contribution of medical anthropology to a new global health movement that is reshaping international health agendas
Duke University Press is pleased to announce the second edition of the bestselling Social Medicine Reader. The Reader provides a survey of the challenging issues facing today's health care providers, patients, and caregivers by bringing together moving narratives of illness, commentaries by physicians, debates about complex medical cases, and conceptually and empirically based writings by scholars in medicine, the social sciences, and the humanities. The first edition of The Social Medicine Reader was a single volume. This significantly revised and expanded second edition is divided into three volumes to facilitate use by different audiences with varying interests. Praise for the 3-volume second edition of The Social Medicine Reader: "A superb collection of essays that illuminate the role of medicine in modern society. Students and general readers are not likely to find anything better."--Arnold S. Relman, Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School Praise for the first edition: "This reviewer strongly recommends The Social Medicine Reader to the attention of medical educators."--Samuel W. Bloom, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association Volume 1: A woman with what is quite probably a terminal illness must choose between courses of treatment based on contradictory diagnoses. A medical student causes acute pain in his patients as he learns to insert a central line. One doctor wonders how to react when a patient asks him to pray with her; another struggles to come to terms with his mistakes. A physician writes in a prominent medical journal about facilitating a dying woman's wish to end her life on her own terms; letters to the editor reflect passionate responses both in support of and in opposition to his actions. These experiences and many more are vividly rendered in Patients, Doctors, and Illness, which brings together nineteen pieces that appeared in the first edition of The Social Medicine Reader and eighteen pieces new to this edition. This volume examines the roles and training of health care professionals and their relationship with patients, ethics in health care, and end-of-life experiences and decisions. It includes fiction and nonfiction narratives and poetry; definitions and case-based discussions of moral precepts in health care, such as truth telling, informed consent, privacy, and autonomy; and readings that provide legal, ethical, and practical perspectives on many familiar but persistent ethical and social questions raised by illness and care. Contributors: Yehuda Amichai, Marcia Angell, George J. Annas, Marc D. Basson, Doris Betts, Amy Bloom, Abenaa Brewster, Raymond Carver, Eric J. Cassell, Larry R. Churchill, James Dickey, Gerald Dworkin, James Dwyer, Miles J. Edwards, Charles R. Feldstein, Chris Feudtner, Leonard Fleck, Arthur Frank, Benjamin Freedman, Atul Gawande, Jerome Groopman, Lawrence D. Grouse, David Hilfiker, Nancy M. P. King, Perri Klass, Melvin Konner, Bobbie Ann Mason, Steven H. Miles, Sharon Olds, Katha Pollitt, Timothy E. Quill, David Schenck, Daniel Shapiro, Susan W. Tolle, Alice Stewart Trillin, William Carlos Williams
Biomedicine is often thought to provide a scientific account of the human body and of illness. In this view, non-Western and folk medical systems are regarded as systems of 'belief' and subtly discounted. This is an impoverished perspective for understanding illness and healing across cultures, one that neglects many facets of Western medical practice and obscures its kinship with healing in other traditions. Drawing on his research in several American and Middle Eastern medical settings, in this 1993 book Professor Good develops a critical, anthropological account of medical knowledge and practice. He shows how physicians and healers enter and inhabit distinctive worlds of meaning and experience. He explores how stories or illness narratives are joined with bodily experience in shaping and responding to human suffering and argues that moral and aesthetic considerations are present in routine medical practice as in other forms of healing.