Analyzing the relationship between medicine and the media from different perspectives, these new essays fill a gap in this emerging field, providing new information on approaches to health communication and important reevaluations of health literacy theories.The contributors discuss ideas and methodologies across a range of topics, including multifaceted health communication, media coverage of maternal health, the rhetoric of diagnosis in autoimmune illness, media representation of...

Media Events: A Critical Contemporary Approach proposes an interdisciplinary and multicultural approach of Dayan and Katz's theory of media events (1992) by applying it to contemporary situations. The contributing authors come from a range of countries (UK, USA, Mexico, Germany, Finland, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Ukraine) and analyse the theory of media events from different perspectives, incorporating social media and offering a re-positioning of Dayan and Katz's theory of media events. By...

"Critical Reflections on Audience and Narrativity—New connections, New perspectives" offers an interdisciplinary and multicultural approach to fiction, reality, and narrativity applied to television series from all over the world. Dissecting the almost invisible barrier between fiction and reality in TV series from various perspectives, the chapters cover a wide range of contemporary classics from the post-network age. From "The X-Files" and "Desperate Housewives" to "The Wire" and "Breaki...

Health is a contested concept that has been defined in numerous ways. The media is extremely powerful in promoting health beliefs and in creating role models for contemporary people. The ways in which health is defined or understood can have wide-ranging implications and can have an impact on issues such as health promotion or health literacy. Health presentation in the media has a significant social impact because this type of message is important in changing people's beliefs, attitudes a...

The medical establishment has become a major threat to health'. So begins Ivan Illich's spirited and reasoned attack upon the mythic prestige of contemporary medicines, examining the customs and rituals conducted by the medical profession. Relentlessly and with full documentation taken from recognized medical sources Illich proves the impotence of medical services to change life expectancy, the insignificance of most clinical care in curing disease, the magnitude of medically inflicted dam...

For nearly thirty years, anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer has traveled to some of the most impoverished places on earth to bring comfort and the best possible medical care to the poorest of the poor. Driven by his stated intent to "make human rights substantial," Farmer has treated patients—and worked to address the root causes of their disease—in Haiti, Boston, Peru, Rwanda, and elsewhere in the developing world. In 1987, with several colleagues, he founded Partners In Health to p...

"A splendid history of mind-body medicine...a book that desperately needed to be written."—Jerome Groopman, New York TimesIs stress a deadly disease on the rise in modern society? Can mind-body practices from the East help us become well? When it comes to healing, we believe we must look beyond doctors and drugs; we must look within ourselves. Faith, relationships, and attitude matter.But why do we believe such things? From psychoanalysis to the placebo effect to m...

This “insightful and instructive primer” debunks the twenty-one most common myths and misconceptions about transgender issues—“buy this book and share it with [your] whole family” (Bust)From Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner to Thomas Beatie (“the pregnant man”) and transgender youth, coverage of trans lives has been exploding—yet so much misinformation persists. Bringing together the medical, social, psychological, and political aspects of being trans in the...

A Companion to Medical Anthropology examines the current issues, controversies, and state of the field in medical anthropology today.Provides an expert view of the major topics and themes to concern the discipline since its founding in the 1960sWritten by leading international scholars in medical anthropologyCovers environmental health, global health, biotechnology, syndemics, nutrition, substance abuse, infectious disease, and sexuality and repro...

An Anthropology of Biomedicine is an exciting new introduction to biomedicine and its global implications. Focusing on the ways in which the application of biomedical technologies bring about radical changes to societies at large, cultural anthropologist Margaret Lock and her co-author physician and medical anthropologist Vinh-Kim Nguyen develop and integrate the thesis that the human body in health and illness is the elusive product of nature and culture that refuses to be pinned...

What do the invention of anaesthetics in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Nazis' use of cocaine, and the development of Prozac have in common? The answer is that they're all products of the same logic that defines our contemporary era: 'the age of anaesthesia'. Laurent de Sutter shows how large aspects of our lives are now characterised by the management of our emotions through drugs, ranging from the everyday use of sleeping pills to hard narcotics. Chemistry has become so much a...

Navigates the divergent cultural meanings of health, and its entanglement with morality in current political discourseYou see someone smoking a cigarette and say,“Smoking is bad for your health,” when what you mean is, “You are a bad person because you smoke.” You encounter someone whose body size you deem excessive, and say, “Obesity is bad for your health,” when what you mean is, “You are lazy, unsightly, or weak of will.” You see a woman bottle-feeding an infant...