Bücher der Reihe Routledge Studies in the Sociology of Health and Illness

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 explores how this happens and how we can change it. This interdisciplinary volume is grounded in a framework that challenges the dominant discourse that health in fat individuals must be improved through weight loss. The first part explores the negative impacts of bias, discrimination, and other harms by health care providers against fat individuals. The second part addresses how we can 'fatten' pedagogy for current and future health care providers, discussing how we can address anti-fat bias in education for health professionals and how alternative frameworks, such as Health at Every Size, can be successfully incorporated into training so that health outcomes for fat people improve.Examining what works and what fails in teaching health care providers to truly care for the health of fat individuals without further stigmatizing them or harming them, this book is for scholars and practitioners with an interest in fat studies and health education from a range of backgrounds, including medicine, nursing, social work, nutrition, physiotherapy, psychology, sociology, education and gender studies.

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.

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.

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 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.Organs for transplantations come from two sources: living or post-mortem organ donations. These sources set different routes of movement from one body to another. Postmortem organ donations are mainly sourced and allocated by state agencies, while living organ donations are the result of informal relations between donor and recipient. Each route traverses different social institutions, determines discrete interaction between donor and recipient, and is charged with moral meanings that can be competing and contrasting. The political economy of organs for transplants is the gamut of these routes and their interconnections, and this book suggests how such a political economy looks like: what are its features and contours, its negotiation of the roles of the state, market and the family in procuring organs for transplantations, and its ultimate moral justifications. Drawing on Boas' personal experiences of waiting, searching and obtaining organs, each autobiographical section of the book sheds light on a different aspect of the discussed political economy of organs - post-mortem donations, parental donation, and organ market - and illustrates the experience of living with the fear of rejection and the intimidation of chronic shortage.A Political Economy of Organ Transplantation is of interest to students and academics with an interest in bioethics, sociology of health and illness, medical anthropology, and science and technology studies.

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.

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.