Sociology of Health and Medicine 2014

This is the first textbook/ reference work on sociology
of health and medicine in the country.

It is aimed at giving exposure to both, sociology and medical
students interested in health and medicine.

It works both as a textbook and a reference book.

Health and medicine have interested demographers and public health experts
more than social scientists in India. Foundational questions on the meaning and
experience of health and the role of medicine, are glossed over as health and medicine
are taken for granted and not opened up as objects for enquiry. How do we distinguish
between health and ill-health, given that the experience of disease and its detection
is deeply embedded in social settings?
How do we distinguish something
purely as a health problem from a problem of life or misfortune? Does the medical
establishment define the rapidly increasing life-style problems as 'diseases' and
medicate them? Social sciences try to answer such 'health experience' related questions
by probing several situations and experiences to draw insights in a comparative
perspective. On the role of medicine, people from different walks of life, the patient,
the physician, the healthcare administrator, and pharmacologist, to name a few,
use different standards to assess effectiveness of therapy. How do we understand
the efficacy and effectiveness of cure when there are several competing standpoints?
What is the impact of privatisation and corporatisation of medicine on health? Drawing
upon published social science research in the field, this book discusses many of
these foundational questions.
International scholarship on the sociology
of health and medicine defines itself only in relation to allopathy/biomedicine
and is yet to grapple with the theoretical implications of other contemporary theories
of body and disease suggested by the continuity of Asian or African systems of medicine.
This book introduces medical pluralism into the heart of social theory of health
and medicine. A first of its kind, the book is aimed at showing the link between
general questions on the one hand, and, the specific issues pertaining to health
status, medical care, pharmaceutical industry and traditional medicine in India,
on the other.

Readership: Scholars and students of Sociology MA/M.Phil optional
on sociology of health/health and society/health culture and society along with
students and teachers of social work, nursing, public health and social medicine,
development studies, population studies.