Medical sociology

The devastating effects of HIV/AIDS have propelled a multiplicity of activities at global, national and local level.

The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is a site where hi-tech medicine and vulnerable human beings come into close contact.

This book overturns the idea that psychiatric drugs work by correcting chemical imbalance and analyzes the professional, commercial and political vested interests that have shaped this view.

HIV/AIDS is the major political challenge of our time.

Gender, Identity and Reproduction draws on a variety of perspectives relevant to an understanding of reproduction across the life-course.

Located between three powerful phenomena, public health, the law and social stigma, methadone maintenance treatment attracts loyal advocates, vociferous critics and innumerable engaged onlookers.

What determines where people shop?

This book explores the intersection between motherhood and physical disability.

This is a cultural history of borders, hygiene and race.

The first detailed and comprehensive analysis of the implications of new health technologies for society, the delivery of health care, and the very meaning of health itself.

This book explores some of the complex ethical quandaries entailed by proposed phase III HIV preventive vaccine trials.

This important book offers unique insights into crime and its prevention in retailing.

This book analyses recent reform trends of European health care systems.

In this unique and engaging book, Sue Pryce tackles the major issues surrounding drug policy.

Winner of the British Sociological Association Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize, 2012.

Why do people enter total institutions - places that confine and control them around the clock - and how does the experience change them?

Psychiatry and psychology have constructed a mental health system that does no justice to the problems it claims to understand and creates multiple problems for its users.

This study, by two leading scholars in the field, draws on feminist theory and science and technology studies to uncover a basic injustice for the human rights of drug-using women: most women who need drug treatment in the US and UK do not get it.

Sociologists have debated suicide since the early days of the discipline.

Why has sleep become increasingly politicized in contemporary society?

This book brings together critical perspectives on some of the recent claims associated with the obesity crisis.

How could something as seemingly transcendental as the human mind have arisen from far simpler material beginnings?

This book argues that the new actors in global health constitute a 'private turn' in global health governance, and provides theoretical and practical grounds for viewing global health partnerships and philanthropic foundations as closely aligned in their ideational and material approaches to a range of important issues and crises.

Bringing together disability theorists and medical sociologists for the first time in this cutting-edge collection, contributors examine chronic illness and disability, disability theory, doctor-patient encounters, lifeworld issues and the new genetics.

This edited collection investigates the biomedical and social technologies used to control the HIV pandemic through case studies and critical commentaries from Africa, Europe, North America and Australia.

This book explore assumptions underpinning contemporary health policy discourses that emphasize personal responsibility for health, consider how they attach to changing information technologies, and discuss their influence on emerging forms of health 'work'.

This book provides a three-part investigation into identity construction.

Customer Experience is now the key differentiator as consumers and businesses alike decide among competing brands.

An authoritative, state-of-the-art reference collection, bringing together international experts to examine the key issues and core debates related to gender and healthcare.

This interdisciplinary book indicates the need to address well-being from individual, community and social perspectives in an integrated manner.

This collection opens up spaces where lives end, bodies are disposed of and memories generated: hospitals, hospices, care homes, coroners' courts, funeral premises, cemeteries, roadsides, the spirit world.

Somatic psychology and bodymind therapy (the simultaneous study of the mind and body) are challenging contemporary understandings of the psyche, of what it means to be human and how to heal human suffering.

In the 1970s it seemed infectious diseases had been conquered, but today global epidemics seem to pose a new, more sinister, threat.

This book examines the developments in electronic markets in relation to three key areas: online retailing, electronic collaboration and electronic marketplaces.

This book provides a collection of original essays on cutting-edge topics in medical ethics research.

Marketing Through Turbulent Times offers a range of tools, principles and approaches for decision makers who want to lead their organization toward a robust future by ensuring that their marketing strategies are not only relevant for today's difficult environment but will also lay the foundation for innovative growth opportunities.

This new book focuses on the analysis of the online strategy and development of the luxury industry, tracing the evolution of the Internet from a means of communication to a trade and distribution channel.

This volume breaks new ground by asking how our understandings of gender can be informed by exploring the socio-technical relations of ICTs in health care, and how far an appreciation of the ways in which gender works can inform and improve our understanding of how ICTs are being developed, implemented, and used in health care contexts.

Challenging notions of what constitutes 'normal' and 'pathological' bodies, this ambitious, agenda-setting study theoretically reinvigorates disability studies by reconceptualising it as 'studies of ableism' focusing on the practices and formations of able-bodiedness to uncover what it means to be 'able' rather than 'disabled'.

Exploring the implications of the internet and bio-technologies for intimate and sexual life, this book discusses the concept of citizenship in relation to the extension of public health through the internet, and reveals concerns that sexually transmitted infections and HIV are associated with such technologies.

Globalization is reshaping the field of health promotion practice.

From bandage to the bioreactor, this book looks at five different device technologies from inception to healthcare practice, drawing on medical sociology, science and technology studies and political science.

How do we know we are ill?

Welcome or not, most citizens in Western countries are unable to go through a day without receiving a dose of health information.

This book presents a history of AIDS control in Uganda, from the start of the epidemic in the early 1980s up until 2005.

This volume analyzes the representation of disabled and disfigured bodies in contemporary art and its various contexts, from art history to photography to medical displays to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century freak show.

In the years since the end of apartheid, South Africans have enjoyed a progressive constitution, considerable access to social services for the poor and sick, and a booming economy that has made their nation into one of the wealthiest on the continent.

This book examines the international causes of hunger and malnutrition and reveals how critical elements of the global economy heighten food insecurity in the developing world.

How do visual images shape the practice of medicine?

While Western medicine has conventionally separated music, science, and religion into distinct entities, traditional cultures throughout the world have always viewed music as a bridge that connects the physical with the spiritual.