Routledge International Handbook of Critical Issues in Health and Illness

Kerry Chamberlain, Antonia Lyons, Kerry Chamberlain, Antonia Lyons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000408423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Issues in Health and Illness is a multidisciplinary reference book that brings together cutting-edge health and illness topics from around the globe. It offers a range of theoretical and critical perspectives to provide contemporary insights into complex health issues that can offer ways to address inequitable patterns of illness and ill health.

This collection, written by an international pool of expert academics from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, is unique in providing theoretical and critical analyses on key health topics, considering power and broader social structures that influence health and illness outcomes. The chapters are organised in three parts. The first covers medical contexts; here, chapters provide commentary and critical analysis of the history of medicine, medicalisation, pharmaceuticalisation, services and care, medical technology, diagnosis, screening, personalised medicine, and complementary and alternative medicine. The second part covers life contexts; chapters include a range of life contexts that have implications for health, including gender, sexuality, reproduction, disability, ethnicity, indigeneity, inequality, ageing, and dying. The third part covers shifting contextual domains; chapters consider contemporary areas of life that are rapidly changing, including bioethics, digital health, migration, medical travel, geography and "place", commercialisation, globalisation, and climate change.

The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Issues in Health and Illness is a key contemporary reference text for scholars, students, researchers, and professionals across disciplines, including sociology, psychology, anthropology, geography, medicine, public health, and health science.

1 Critical perspectives on health and illness

Antonia Lyons and Kerry Chamberlain

Introduction

Health and illness are significant concerns around the world, and garner enormous amounts of research attention, funding, and scholarship across many disciplines and fields. Most health and illness topics and issues have strong contemporary relevance internationally. The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Issues in Health and Illness aims to provide a current, multidisciplinary, international reference handbook that covers an important, and comprehensive, range of topics and issues that are central to health and illness. Research and analysis on these topics cut across many disciplines (sociology, psychology, anthropology, geography, medicine, public health, nursing, health science, sport and exercise, etc.), and consequently our plan for this handbook was for content to be multidisciplinary and inclusive, and comprehensive to a wide audience of readers from different disciplinary backgrounds.

There are many excellent handbooks that are concerned with health (e.g. Handbook of Global Urban Health, edited by Vojnovic et al., 2019; Routledge Handbook of Health Geography, edited by Andrews, Pearce, & Crooks, 2018; The Oxford Handbook of Global Health Politics, edited by McInnes, Lee, & Youde, 2020; The Oxford Handbook of Stigma, Discrimination, and Health, edited by Major, Dovidio, & Link, 2018), and some that take explicitly critical perspectives (e.g. Health Inequalities: Critical Perspectives, edited by Bambra, Smith, & Hill, 2016; Staying Alive: Critical Perspectives on Health, Illness, and Health care, edited by Raphael, Rioux, & Bryant, 2019; Routledge International Handbook of Critical Mental Health, edited by Cohen, 2017). However, currently none are designed to address key contemporary health and illness topics using critical perspectives across disciplines and fields ranging from medicine to globalisation and climate change.

As co-editors of the Routledge series Critical Approaches to Health, we have had the pleasure of working with a range of authors, from different backgrounds and disciplines, who have written books for this series. Over the past eight years we have identified many potentially relevant topics, and possible authors, who could contribute excellent books for this series, leading us to realise that what was missing for researchers and students was a comprehensive overview of critical approaches to specific health and illness topics from a range of different disciplinary perspectives. This was the impetus for the current handbook; we saw the potential for it to make a distinctive contribution to the field. This is a large remit that traverses many fields and is integrated by a particular approach to scholarship, namely theorising and conceptualising critical perspectives on particular health and illness topics. The work presented in specific chapters often sits within its own disciplinary boundaries yet has high relevance to scholars working on these health issues across many different disciplines.

What do we mean by taking critical perspectives on health and illness topics? As we have outlined elsewhere (Chamberlain & Lyons, 2020, p. 431), critical perspectives mean “explicitly considering the nature of knowledge generation, the paradigms in which it was generated, and the consequences of this in terms of what knowledge is produced, with whom, and who benefits from this knowledge”. Critical perspectives seek to locate an “object” or topic of investigation, such as health, within its historical, social, and cultural contexts and, in particular, to understand how social and material conditions shape, influence, or constrain the object or topic under consideration. They involve reflexive considerations of how cultural understandings, social structures, and social and material practices operate to determine, shape, and limit the object of study, with an ambition to change practices in ways that can remove or limit disparities and benefit the disadvantaged. In the case of health, this necessarily involves a critical examination of the roles of the different actors and systems involved in health and healthcare – ill people, patients, carers, health professionals, hospitals, clinics, treatments, commercial companies, and so on – to understand and reflexively interpret their influences on health – their interests and involvements, and their power. Critical perspectives usually orient to issues of power, and its distribution and exercise, in the widest sense, including political and economic power, social and cultural power, access to power, and resistance. This can extend to exploring who benefits from the research and practice in the field. In the broadest sense, critical perspectives challenge and unsettle taken-for-granted views on health and illness, or views that might be considered “common-sense” (Cohen, 2017). Often, critical perspectives broaden our view of issues through providing analyses from multiple, diverse, and intersectional standpoints, including gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or marginalised positions. Such analyses can identify ideologies, and the way systems work, how meanings are produced, and how resistance or change may come about. There are, of course, different kinds of critical perspectives and debates about what should be emphasised and even how critical scholarship should be conducted. In this handbook our overarching objective is to render critical perspectives on contemporary health and illness topics more visible and accessible.

Many critical perspectives on health and illness align with the United Nations’ (UN) 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These were adopted by the member states of the UN in 2016 to address global challenges, including to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure well-being for all around the world. The SDG agenda has set specific global targets to be achieved by 2030. Goal 3, to “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”, is clearly relevant for scholars who are working on critical issues in health, although other goals include a range of determinants of health. In fact, all of the 17 SDGs¹ can be viewed as highly relevant to – and indeed are critical issues involved in – health, illness and well-being. Addressing social and global issues such as poverty, hunger, climate change, sustainability, gender equality, education, reduced inequalities, and clean water and sanitation will, without doubt, lead to better health outcomes. The SDGs are integrated and indivisible, with targets across social, environmental, and economic spheres (Nunes, Lee, & O’Riordan, 2016).

Health is influenced by all of the SDGs, but it is worth noting that health and illness reciprocally influence the goals as well. These links between health and broader social, economic, political, and cultural factors operate across levels (individual, societal, global) and lie at the heart of health inequities within and between countries (Lin, Kickbusch, & Baer, 2017). The Director-General of the World Health Organization, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has previously noted that the importance of a global commitment to sustainable development enshrined in the SDGs “offers a unique opportunity to address the social, economic and political determinants of health and improve the health and well-being of people everywhere” (Government of South Australia & WHO, 2017). Integration across the SDGs is important, as is the consideration that health and well-being are both preconditions and outcomes of sustainable development (Nune et al., 2016). The World Health Organisation (n.d.) continues to highlight the importance of the social determinants of health for influencing health and illness outcomes, noting that these are

the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life. These forces and systems include economic policies and systems, development agendas, social norms, social policies and political systems.

About the handbook

The handbook is not focused on specific diseases or illnesses but is organised into three parts to capture the different contexts in which health and illness play out, namely medical contexts, life contexts, and other contemporary contextual domains that are rapidly changing (we have labelled these “shifting contextual domains”). Each of the 26 chapters provides a stand-alone contribution that can be utilised as a separate reading, but each has similar structures and aims. Chapter authors provide an overview of the topic, introduce and discuss the main arguments on the topic, including coverage of the relevant theory and research on the topic, take critical and multidisciplinary perspectives, and conclude by proposing some implications for the topic – for research and for practice where relevant – drawn from the arguments and discussion within the chapter.

Authors come from a range of countries, including the UK, USA, Canada, Sweden, Germany, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. This does produce a focus on Western research and scholarship, although the chapters bring diverse critical perspectives to bear on their specific topics. Also, we have made an effort to be inclusive of diverse views across the globe where this has relevance. Authors also come from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds, including sociology, public health, history, geography, health policy, anthropology, science and technology studies, and psychology. The emphasis on cross-disciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches provides the handbook with a broad, diverse range of epistemic and theoretical frames, adding depth to the ways in which the complexity of health and illness issues can be understood, including how these vary across different life and geographical contexts, and from different worldviews. There are thematic, conceptual, and theoretical links between many of the chapters, within and across the three parts of the handbook. We have organised the handbook in a way that will make it a useful and easily accessible resource for a range of readers, including students, academics, researchers, health professionals, policymakers, and non-governmental organisations.

Part I: Medical contexts

In Part I, each chapter focuses on a key issue relating to medicine, moving from broader and more general issues to more focused ones. These chapters together provide critical considerations of the authority of medicine in society, the operation of power dynamics within institutions, disciplines, clinical practice, and the over-riding commercial imperatives that underlie much of the medical realm.

This section begins (Chapter 2) with an historical discussion, by Catharine Coleborne, of the development of medicine in terms of its social and cultural histories and the significant ways in which medicine has changed. This is followed by several chapters which discuss changing aspects of medicine. The first of these examines medicalisation (Chapter 3), where Felicity Thomas examines the diverse ways in which medicalisation is conceived and experienced, and how it creates controversial and competing agendas. Then Jonathan Gabe and Paul Martin discuss pharmaceuticalisation (Chapter 4) as a complex socio-technical process, involving the global pharmaceutical industry alongside networks of related institutions, organisations, actors, and artefacts, that functions to translate human conditions and capabilities into opportunities for pharmaceutical intervention. Next, Stuart Hogarth and Fiona Miller (Chapter 5) examine the role of health technology in modern medicine, and particularly changes and innovation around medical devices and how they are adopted. Chapter 6 explores health services and care, where Rebecca Olson highlights how political, economic, gendered, raced, and affective forces interconnect and underpin the organisation of formal health services and informal family care. Annemarie Jutel (Chapter 7) considers diagnosis as a social action that is shaped by historical, political, and other social processes that exist outside of the body.

Population-based screening for identifying health and disease is discussed by Natalie Armstrong in Chapter 8, including an overview of the discussions and debates in this field about potentials for harms and benefits. The rapidly growing field of personalised medicine is outlined in Chapter 9, and implications of the changing technologies, datasets, and associated promises for individual identities, behaviours and social cohesion are critically explored by Michael Morrison and Susan Kelly. The final chapter in this section, by Kevin Dew and Supuni Liyanagunarwardena (Chapter 10), considers complementary and alternative medicine, including trends in its uptake and use, how it is positioned in different medical landscapes, and how it relates to biomedicine.

Part II: Life contexts

Part II focuses on a range of important life contexts where issues of health and illness appear sharply, and where contexts impact the type of health experienced and the access to treatment and care for illness. Each of these contexts has significance for health and illness in different ways, providing a space for critical engagement with the relevant issues arising. These chapters all take a critical approach to exploring this diversity of situating contexts – age, gender, sexual orientation, reproductive rights, ethnicity, indigeneity, (dis)ability, social setting – and how they work to locate people in context, affecting how they live, how they experience health and illness, and how they die. The chapters discuss how these particular life contexts affect health outcomes and access to healthcare, located within a critical examination of the dynamics of inequality, disadvantage, oppression, discrimination, and social justice, which form common threads across chapters. The chapters also discuss how these key issues function to shape and constrain the development of relevant policy and appropriate interventions, with many chapters offering suggestions for improvements in these areas.

In the opening chapter of Part II (Chapter 11), Dennis Raphael and Toba Bryant consider the unfair and unjust differences in health outcomes across the world that have their sources in peoples’ living and working conditions. They argue that these social determinants of health and their distribution are determined by government public policy decisions and shaped by dominant ideological frameworks, and that identifying health inequalities and responding to them should be a moral imperative. Then Lisa Jean Moore and Jonathan Torres consider how gender is a primary social determinant of health status and outcomes (Chapter 12), and critically discuss how health inequities exist between genders, race, class, and location. They promote a contemporary perspective on gender and health research that draws from the interdisciplinary contributions of queer theory and transgender studies. This is followed by a consideration of sexual orientation and gender identity (Chapter 13), by Alex Müller, who discusses how these terms are pathologised and limit access to healthcare for sexual and gender minorities, and how global legal frameworks governing sexual orientation and gender identity affect the health of sexual and gender minorities. Tracy Morison ut...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editors
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Critical perspectives on health and illness
• PART I Medical contexts
• PART II Life contexts
• PART III Shifting contextual domains
• Index