Books in the Routledge Studies in the Sociology of Health and Illness series

Weight stigma is so pervasive in our culture that it is often unnoticed, along with the harm that it causes. Health care is rife with anti-fat bias and discrimination against fat people, which compromises care and influences the training of new practitioners.

This book focuses on the paradoxical effect on mental health of social crises. When crises occur, there's an upsurge of mental suffering due to an intensification of such social insanities as violence, inequality, and insecurity. Paradoxically, there are positive consequences due to acts of kindness, cooperation, and the ability to cope and hope.

This book investigates and examines why increasing numbers of people are being diagnosed with autism, aruging that the increased use of autism diagnosis is due to medicalisation across the life-course and crucially asking whether autism itself is useful as a diagnostic category.

This book argues that neoliberal changes in health and social care go beyond resource allocations, priority setting, and privatisation, and manifest in an invidious erosion of the quality of our social relationships, including relationships between care provider and care recipient.

Employing Deleuzo-Guattarian orientations to assemblage and feminist approaches to care, this book offers a critique of neoliberal approaches to recovery from drugs and alcohol, while collapsing the dualities of harm reduction and recovery.

Hearing, health and technologies are entangled in multi-faceted ways. The edited volume addresses this complex relationship by arguing that modern hearing was and is increasingly linked to and mediated by technological innovations.

This innovative work combines a rigorous academic analysis of the political economy of organ supply for transplantation with autobiographical narratives that illuminate the complex experience of being an organ recipient.

The book investigates digitalisation in care for older people by giving insight into service users' and professionals' opportunities to digital agency in the context of European welfare states.

Written by specialists from three different continents, Transnationalising Reproduction examines a broad range of issues concerning kinship and identity, citizenship and regulation, and global markets of reproductive labour; including gamete donation and gestational surrogacy.

Medical advances enable us to make our bodies available to others in an increasing number of ways, for instance, via organ, tissue, egg and sperm donation and surrogate motherhood. This cutting-edge book develops new ways of understanding the ethical, social and cultural aspects of different such bodily exchanges.

Giving Blood represents a new agenda for blood donation research. It explores the diverse historical and contemporary undercurrents that shape how blood donation takes place, and the social meanings that people attribute to the act of giving blood. Organised in three parts, the book¿s chapters turn our attention to key political factors that have shaped blood collection and transfusion practices worldwide.

Patient organizations and social health movements offer an illuminating example of civil society engagement and participation in scientific research.

As expressions of dissatisfaction, disquiet and failings in service provision, past complaining is a vital antidote to progressive histories of health care. This multidisciplinary book uses a critical humanities and social science perspective to explore what has happened historically when medicine generated complaints.

This collection fills an important lacuna by acknowledging the importance of understanding both gender and age when approaching illness experiences.

This innovative volume draws on a range of interdisciplinary perspectives and the voices of people living with dementia to foreground the social dimensions of the dementia experience. The first part critiques the stigmas, the language and fears often associated with a diagnosis of dementia, with the intent of improving quality of care. The second part focuses on the social changes required to live a good life with dementia, discussing issues such as advanced care planning, decision-making and person-centred care. Engaging in a critical conversation around personhood and social value, this book is an vital read for all those practising, studying or researching dementia, wellbeing and health.

This innovative volume uses a Swedish case study to explore how health and social structures - including health services, regulatory bodies and patient groups - are being developed and reconfigured to take into account the increased use of assisted reproductive technologies, such as IVF treatments.

Pain research is still dominated by biomedical perspectives and the need to articulate pain in ways other than those offered by evidence based medical models is pressing. Examining closely subjective experiences of pain, this book explores the way in which pain is situated, communicated and formed in a larger cultural and social context.

Aging Men, Masculinities and Modern Medicine explores the multiple socio-historical contexts surrounding men's aging bodies in modern medicine from a global perspective. It discusses both healthy and diseased states of aging men in medical practices, bringing together theoretical and empirical conceptualisations.

Aging Men, Masculinities and Modern Medicine explores the multiple socio-historical contexts surrounding men's aging bodies in modern medicine from a global perspective. It discusses both healthy and diseased states of aging men in medical practices, bringing together theoretical and empirical conceptualisations.

Pain research is still dominated by biomedical perspectives and the need to articulate pain in ways other than those offered by evidence based medical models is pressing. Examining closely subjective experiences of pain, this book explores the way in which pain is situated, communicated and formed in a larger cultural and social context.