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Understanding Illness & Health provides you with a wide-ranging collection of academic articles that introduce readers to the diverse and multidisciplinary subject of Health Studies (see table of coverage). The goal is to give undergraduate students a sense of the substance and approaches to understanding issues related to health and wellness, disease and illness, and both traditional and alternative approaches to medicineand healthcare.
The text is ideally suited for introductory-level courses that are taught across a wide range of health-related contexts and is broken up in to seven general areas (with a separate section on research in health studies) as follows: |
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Health & the Individual | |||
| Individuals must find a way to come to terms with their illnesses whether they include minor everyday complaints, chronic illnesses, or serious life-threatening diseases. Individual beliefs about one’s illness can change how people react to and adapt to their health problems. The first essay discusses how people adopt different explanations for their illnesses and what the consequences are of such beliefs (Skelton). The next four essays illustrate that some serously ill people can find that illness can become a pathway toward a positive transformation to a more authentic self. The conditions covered are terminal illness (Lewis), Fibromyalgia (Scammel), Multiple Sclerosis (Kauffman), and Cystic Fibrosis (Schubert). |
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Alternative Health Perspectives | |||
| People have always found alternative methods of medicine to complement traditional Western medicine. The first essay examines beliefs about alternative medicine from the Navajo perspective(Corzort) and the second connects traditional religious beliefs with beliefs in alternative medicine ( Donaldson). The last essay outlines the history and research on the health benefits of yoga (Berk). | ||||
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Health & American Society | |||
Concepts such as illness and health do not exist solely as objectively describable, empirically verifiable states of being. These terms are also defined and characterized, in part, by cultural and societal norms. Someone who is understood to be ill in American society might well be described as healthy someplace else, and vice versa. This section of the text begins to unpack some of the cultural and societal forces that help shape American perceptions of several health conditions, including mental illness (O’Brien), obesity (Farrell), and menopause (Winterich). The section concludes with an essay that describes the meaning of illness -- and the relationship that exists between illness and poverty -- in rural Mississippi (Rogers). |
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Political & Economic Perspectives | |||
| Health -- or lack of it -- does not just happen. Rather, our individual and collective states of health are shaped by economic and political forces that are sometimes well beyond our immediate control. For example, the kinds of care we get at the end of life (Lynn), in rural Mississippi (Rogers), or during a health-related disaster (Kamoie) are largely shaped by public policies and economic realities that limit individual control over what kinds of care we get. Likewise, the kinds of choices we can make about insurance coverage (Erfle), reproductive technology (Edlin), and end-of-life care (Hoefler) are constrained by public policies and market forces. The choices adolescents can make about their sexual behavior are shaped in no small part by what they are told (a matter of public policy) about the consequences of that behavior (Rose). And access to health care for many is determined, at least in part, by community partnerships that may (or may not) fill gaps in health care coverage for low-income citizens. Taken together, the essays in this section will provide readers with a sense for how the status of our health and the range of our health-related choices are -- to one degree or another -- beyond our direct control. | ||||
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Health in an International Context | |||
| Understanding health in an international context is important because it can help us identify health behaviors and attitudes that are similar across cultures as well as allowing us to see patterns that are unique to a given culture. In the chapter on smoking risk perceptions (Helweg-Larsen), the discussion focuses on patterns of similarity and difference between smokers and non-smokers in the U.S. and Denmark. Violence against women has come to be understood as one of the most widespread and pressing global health issues of our time and the second essay in this section (Rose) looks at the historical and cultural factors that influence whether victims of gender-related violence from different countries are able to bear witness to and take solace from personalized expressions of their common experiences. Finally, a case study from Bolivia (McGurn) examines how the strategic use of regional and political symbolism in that country made it possible to elevate the classification of venomous snakebite (a serious health problem, but one affecting only a minority of Bolivians) to the level of national public health threat. | ||||
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Representational & Personal Perspectives | |||
It is sometimes said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This section of the text grapples with a similar claim; that illness is in the eye of the beholder. The first two essays describe how artists’ representations of illness and health can help us understand more general attitudes about these concepts in late-19th century Europe (Hirsh) and America (Lee). The next two essays deal with literary representations of physical disability (Kupetz) and sexual violence (Stockton). Both of these essays also address how literary representations both reflect, and shape, cultural understandings of the phenomena discussed. |
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Health Studies Research | |||
| The breadth and interdisciplinary nature of health studies makes information gathering complex. This section discuses several issues related to conducting acadmic research on health studies, including information retrieval strategies (Arndt) and (TBA). | ||||