Gender Perspectives on Health and Medicine, Volume 7: Key Themes (Advances in Gender Research Series)

Exploring gender, health and medicine, this collection of essays asserts that medicine is a gendered and class-structured institution. Taken as a whole, the volume offers a critique of exclusively biomedical approaches to personal and public health, and calls for more sociological input, qualitative research and an intersectional approach to help us understand various aspects of health and illness. personal and social problems, the commodification of healthcare, and questions of agency, responsibility and control on the parts of recipients and dispensers of healthcare. Six of the seven essays deal with Western medicine exclusively, and the seventh examines a situation where women have a choice between Western and traditional treatment. Timely topics such as somatic distress among women with breast cancer, drug company funding of research on women's sexual problems, and racial and ethnic health disparities are represented. managing pregnancy and childbirth.