A year or so ago, having delivered a urine sample showing an unusually high sugar content, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. It was fortuitous, unrelated to the rationale for the test, an unexpected outcome. The first GP I saw said he was reluctant to call it out as diabetes prematurely. He put me… Read More »
There is a real risk that the transition to ‘senior’ – let alone retired – academic is accompanied by a shift in output towards: (a) quasi-magesterial overviews of literatures, and/or (b) sheer, unadulterated repetition. I may show signs of such shifts but fortunately that’s for others to ascertain (I’m a babyboomer touching 70 after all).… Read More »
I’m in a hotel bar in Glasgow, having fled the disco that ritually follows the conference meal at MedSoc. This is the province of the ageless Rose Barbour and Richard Compton, and long may it continue. For decades I’ve kept my own dancing under wraps (in fact it comprises a nostalgic and postmodern admix of… Read More »
The recent article in the BMJ purporting to show the negative effects on mortality in England of funding ‘constraints’ on health and social care has excited considerable attention (if not by the BBC). In this blog I precis the article in the hope of encouraging more people to read the original. The authors note that… Read More »
I have always regarded ‘theory’ as an inescapable component of writing about the world we inhabit. To say how the world is, in however modest a fashion, is after all to sign up to a family of ontological, epistemological and moral premises: that is to say, to sign up to a degree of commitment to… Read More »
I have written quite a bit about social class and health, but relatively little about gender and health. The logic behind this resides in my thesis that the paramount explanatory mechanism in post-1970s financial capital is the ‘class/command dynamic’. This does not of course mean that I think gender (or ethnicity, age and so on)… Read More »
The attention publicly devoted to mental illness is far from being matched by properly funded treatment and care. Nor, it seems, has it shaken off an overly long history of cultural shaming and blaming. In this brief contribution I focus in particular on the stigma that still sticks like glue to many diagnoses of mental… Read More »
This is a revised version of an item written for Bill Cockerham’s Encyclopaedia of Medical Sociology a while back. Stigma, I noted somewhat uncontroversially, denotes the presence of an attribute that discredits its possessor. Since it is evident such attributes have varied by time and place, it is apparent that stigma and stigmatization necessarily involve… Read More »
This is an adaption of a piece I wrote for Bill Cockerham’s Encyclopaedia of Medical Sociology a while ago. It stands alone but I hope it also complements other blogs I have written on critical realism’s range and merits. Since I first wrote it: (a) sadly (he was a lovely as well as talented man)… Read More »
I have not blogged about the NHS for quite some time. In fact the last occasion I explicitly did so was when Wendy Savage and I were campaigning together in 2011 to strangle the Health and Social Care Bill at birth (our talks to students still reside somewhere on YouTube). I remain sceptical and confused… Read More »