During most of this century, American health policy has emphasized caring for acute conditions rather than preventing and managing chronic illness—even though chronic illness has caused most sickness and death since the 1920s. In this provocative and wide-ranging book, Daniel Fox explains why this has been so and offers a forceful argument for fundamental change in national health care priorities. Fox discusses how ideas about illness and health care, as well as the power of special interest groups, have shaped the ways in which Americans have treated illness. Those who make health policy decisions have increased support for hospitals, physicians, and medical research, believing that people then would become healthier. This position, implemented at considerable cost, has not adequately taken into account the growing burden of chronic disabling illness. While decision makers may have defined chronic disease as a high priority in research, they have not given it such a priority in the financing of health services. The increasing burden of chronic illness is critical. Fox suggests ways to solve this problem without increasing the already high cost of health care—but he does not underestimate the difficulties in such a strategy. Advocating the redistribution of resources within hospital and medical services, he targets those that are redundant or marginally effective. There could be no more timely subject today than American health care. And Daniel Fox is uniquely able to address its problems. A historian of medicine, with knowledge of how hospitals and physicians behave and how health policy is made at government levels, he has extensively researched published and unpublished documents on health care. What he proposes could profoundly affect all Americans.

The reader, whether a professional health care worker, researcher, clinician, or concerned individual, will obtain a clearer perspective on the connections between men′s health and gender, along with a broader conceptualization of the experiences of men in contemporary society. --Choice Men′s Health and Illness contextualizes men′s health issues within the broader theoretical framework of the new men′s studies. This framework focuses on the profound influence of gender on social life and individual experience. The editors and chapter contributors of this groundbreaking volume argue that gender is a key factor for understanding the patterns of men′s health risks, the ways men perceive and use their bodies, and men′s psychological adjustment to illness itself. Part I introduces readers to men′s studies perspectives and explains their relevance for understanding men′s health. Part II explores the linkages between traditional gender roles, men′s health, and larger structural and cultural contexts, and Part III examines the implications of multiple masculinities for health issues. The scope of this volume is both multidisciplinary and international. The authors use quantitative and qualitative research methodologies which provide a well-rounded analysis of the subject matter. Taken collectively, the contributions to Men′s Health and Illness reflect current efforts by men′s studies practitioners to develop theoretical explanations of men′s lives that also refer to the influences of class, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, and age. This collaborative effort in presenting research and theories is so significant that it should become part of the literature studied by advocates of women′s studies and men′s studies. The reader, whether professional healthcare worker, researcher, clinician, or concerned individual will obtain a clearer perspective on the connections between men′s health and gender, along with a broader conceptualization of the experiences of men in contemporary society. Upper-division undergraduate through professional." --Choice

"Pathologies of Power" uses harrowing stories of life and death to argue thatthe promotion of social and economic rights of the poor is the most importanthuman rights struggle of our times.

This classic book, long out of print in English, challenges accepted ideas of illness by suggesting it’s not an enemy to be fought. When you see your symptoms as bodily expressions of psychological or spiritual conflicts, you can use them as guides to inner work. You can respond to troubles with infection, allergies, respiration, digestion, skin, nervous system, heart and circulation, sexuality and pregnancy, even accidents, with practical actions that heal the heart and mind.

Curing their Ills traces the history of encounters between European medicine and African societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Vaughan's detailed examination of medical discourse of the period reveals its shifting and fragmented nature, highlights its use in the creation of the colonial subject in Africa, and explores the conflict between its pretensions to scientific neutrality and its political and cultural motivations. The book includes chapters on the history of psychiatry in Africa, on the treatment of venereal diseases, on the memoirs of European 'Jungle Doctors', and on mission medicine. In exploring the representations of disease as well as medical practice, Curing their Ills makes a fascinating and original contribution to both medical history and the social history of Africa.

Examining the influence and power of beliefs in medicine, this text looks at key theories in the context of aetiology, treatment and recovery, for both the clinician and the patient.

What if, instead of reaching backward to "recover" in the traditional sense, to a prior state of health, individuals with psychiatric diagnoses reached forward to procover, to focus on life instead of illness, to build new dreams and find new purpose? What if those who support and treat these individuals were able to easily create and support this change? In The Power of Procovery in Healing Mental Illness, Kathleen Crowley--author of the powerful first person account of healing, The Day Room, A Memoir of Madness and Mending--shows that a simple shift in focus can initiate a transformative cycle of healing. This book tells you how and why. It is complete with extensive procovery notes for consumers, family and staff. You don't have to start The Power of Procovery at the beginning; just start anywhere. You'll soon discover that procovery is within anyone's grasp. It's a path to healing built upon hope.

The story of a recovery from a crippling disease and the physician patient partnership that beat the odds by using the patient's own capabilities.

In less than four months, beginning with a staff of five, an obscure office buried deep within the federal bureaucracy transformed the nation's hospitals from our most racially and economically segregated institutions into our most integrated. These powerful private institutions, which had for a half century selectively served people on the basis of race and wealth, began equally caring for all on the basis of need. The book draws the reader into the struggles of the unsung heroes of the transformation, black medical leaders whose stubborn courage helped shape the larger civil rights movement. They demanded an end to federal subsidization of discrimination in the form of Medicare payments to hospitals that embraced the "separate but equal" creed that shaped American life during the Jim Crow era. Faced with this pressure, the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations tried to play a cautious chess game, but that game led to perhaps the biggest gamble in the history of domestic policy. Leaders secretly recruited volunteer federal employees to serve as inspectors, and an invisible army of hospital workers and civil rights activists to work as agents, making it impossible for hospitals to get Medicare dollars with mere paper compliance. These triumphs did not come without casualties, yet the story offers lessons and hope for realizing this transformational dream.