Summary
Contents
Subject index
This timely and assured text provides lecturers and students with a well informed, penetrating analysis of the key questions in medicine and society. The book is divided into three sections. It opens with a well judged account of the context of health and illness. It moves on to examine the process and experience of illness. Finally, it examines how health care is negotiated and delivered.
Challenges to Medicine
Challenges to Medicine
Challenges to medicine
Chapter Summary
This chapter describes:
- how the context and content of medical practice have changed over the past 100 years and the pace of change does not look like slowing;
- how medicine remains a socially valued practice and a powerful professional group which dominates the way that healthcare is delivered;
- how the public's commitment to medicine and its beneficent potential is matched by critical commentary on the effects of medical practice;
- how medicine's response to criticism has often been to reform medical practice, yet there is a great tendency to dismiss non-medical critique;
- how new viral infections and drug resistant bacteria represent a non-human threat to medicine, the scale of which is hard to quantify.
Useful Term for this Chapter
majority world: instead ...
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