The development of modern medicine is on a very steep trajectory upward--a rise that began only about a hundred years ago. This rise is certainly quantitative, but it is accompanied by qualitative changes in the way we understand and deliver healthcare. This book begins with a look at three recognized periods of medical development--from 1900 until World War II, from the war until about 1980, and the period since 1980. While the common response is to celebrate these developments, this book suggests that perhaps we should also be wary, especially of the qualitative changes. Since World War II, these medical developments have entered more and more areas of our lives. It is precisely this process of medicalization that should be critically examined. Since 1980 we have medicalized life itself. Drawing from medical sociology, the book examines four characteristics of contemporary Western health care: health as a system, risk as a means of understanding health, health as a commodity, and individual responsibility for health. Critical examination of these four tendencies in contemporary health care forms the core of the argument of this important book about the essence of biohealth and medical practice.

Biohealth: Beyond Medicalization: Imposing Health

Downing, Raymond

Religion & Spirituality

Pickwick Publications

Family physician Raymond Downing offers a bold critique of western medicine and sees medical care as one of the fallen "principalities and powers" in need of redemption. But Downing's hope lies beyond biomedicine--in biblical healing, especially the healing miracles of Jesus. In conversation with the Bible, Ivan Illich, William Stringfellow, Susan Sontag, and others, Downing revisits how Westerners approach medicine. He sees suffering and healing as essentially spiritual experiences at the roots of death and life.

Death and Life in America, Second Edition: Biomedicine and Biblical Healing

Cascade Books

Death and Life in America, Second Edition

African AIDS, in the West, is often associated with media images of skeletal, forlorn-looking and dying Africans inviting the sympathy of the viewer or reader. Associated with these images are often motleys of subtly hidden narratives - poverty, promiscuity, failed leadership, impending Armageddon, and lately the greed and heartlessness of Western drugs companies who are harangued for prioritising profits over African lives. But how do Africans themselves see AIDS? What do they believe causes the disease? How do those affected by the undeniable epidemic really live with it? And how has the disease affected the Africans' sense of who they are? With the possible exception of the perspectives espoused by President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa - much of which is distorted - the African AIDS discourse, has, as with most things African, been severely marginalized, if not completely kept away from the Western media. Dr Raymond Downing, an American medical doctor, who with his wife (also a medical doctor) have been living and practising medicine in different African countries for over fifteen years, seeks to plug this lacuna with this book. Based on personal observations, interviews, the reading of African press, books and AIDS narrative in African fiction, as well as in academic papers, Dr Downing charts the development of the African AIDS discourse. He invites the reader to look beyond the AIDS epidemic to see how Africans view health and diseases in general. Raymond Downing was born in Massachusetts, USA, and studied medicine in New York between 1971 and 1975. He and his wife, Janice Armstrong, have practised medicine in Sudan, Tanzania and Kenya for more than fifteen years. His other books include The Wedding Goes On without Us, which was published in Kenya in 2002.

As They See It: The Development of the African AIDS Discourse

Politics & Social Sciences

Sociology

Adonis & Abbey Pub Ltd

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