Health and Health Care as Social Problems (Understanding Social Problems: An SSSP Presidential Series) - Softcover

This engaging and accessible reader takes a social problems approach to health and medicine, providing a broad and critical lens on contemporary health problems. Designed for courses on social problems and on medical sociology, the volume embraces two fundamental principles: that health and illness are at least partly socially produced, and that health care is not an unfettered good and often brings with it serious social problems. The volume is organized into six sections, addressing the medicalization of human problems; the social construction of health problems; social movements; gender; race and class and the provision of health care; and medical accountability. Taken together, the essays demonstrate the depth and richness of a social problems approach to health and medicine, and the critical perspective it brings to our understanding of health and illness in U.S. society.

Peter Conrad is Harry Coplan Professor of Social Sciences at Brandeis University. His major research interests are in health and illness, social problems, and deviance. He served as president of the SSSP during 1996-97. He is currently completing a book on 'the medicalization of society.' Valerie Leiter is assistant professor of sociology at Simmons College. Her work focuses on disability, sociology of childhood, and family sociology. Currently, her research examines children's access to health care, and formal and familial systems of care for children with disabilities.