In the past, most people encountered death at a relatively young age. Dying relatives were cared for at home, and mortality rates were higher. Today, there is much less familiarity with death, which increasingly takes place in hospitals, hospices and nursing homes. This wide-ranging and enlightening book offers an exploration of death and dying as human conditions that impact on the individual, their significant others and those involved with their care and well-being. It is aimed at medical ...

Childhood and teenage pregnancy continues to pose significant social and health concerns within the UK and beyond. It is an issue that has implications for individuals across a range of professions and disciplines.This book is written for nurses, midwives, doctors, social workers and teachers, as well as students of sexual and reproductive health and welfare.It highlights some of the issues faced by sexually active young people and those who work with them. It will also be useful to general r...

A wide-ranging collection of both classic writings and more recent articles in the sociology of health and illness, this reader is organized into the following sections:* health beliefs and knowledge* inequalities and patterning of health and illness* professional and patient interaction* chronic illness and disability* evaluation and politics in health care.With a thorough introduction which sets the scene for the field as a whole, and section i...

In this new edition of his landmark book, Richard Layard shows that there is a paradox at the heart of our lives. Most people want more income. Yet as societies become richer, they do not become happier. This is not just anecdotally true, it is the story told by countless pieces of scientific research. We now have sophisticated ways of measuring how happy people are, and all the evidence shows that on average people have grown no happier in the last fifty years, even as average incomes hav...

Why do we need sleep? How much sleep is enough? What is sleep? What happens when we don't get enough? We spend about a third of our lives asleep - it plays a crucial role in our health and wellbeing. References to sleep abound in literature and art, and sleep has been recognized as fundamental to the human condition for thousands of years. Over the past century, our knowledge of how sleep occurs, what it does, and what happens to our health if we do not have enough has developed h...

‘A radical antidote to the constraints of our current conceptualisation of mental health’ Dazed‘Exposes the underlying truth that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with our wellbeing, and teaches us how to transform the ways we understand madness, illness, and disability to build a better world’ Beatrice Adler-Bolton, co-author of Health CommunismMental health is a political issue, but we often discuss it as a perso...

This key textbook provides a firm grounding in theoretical and practical aspects of the study of sexual health for both undergraduates and post-graduates.

This title is directed primarily towards health care professionals outside of the United States. Nursing practice needs to be informed by an understanding of people and the societies in which they live. This introductory text has been designed specifically to discuss those aspects of sociology which are most relevant to nursing and the health care context in which it takes place.•A user-friendly introduction to a subject which students often find strange and new•Relates sociology to health...

Pregnant women and maternity services are facing an induction epidemic. As medical guidelines include more “at risk” categories, women and our already overwhelmed and under resourced maternity systems are increasingly pressured to induce birth before labour begins spontaneously. Women are deemed to be too large and too old, while babies are estimated to be too big and too overdue. But is ‘better-out-than-in’ really a safer option than waiting to birth in your own time?Staggeringly,...

Ageing is an activity we are familiar with from an early age. In our younger years upcoming birthdays are anticipated with an excitement that somewhat diminishes as the years progress. As we grow older we are bombarded with advice on ways to overcome, thwart, resist, and, on the rare occasion, embrace, one's ageing. Have all human beings from the various historical epochs and cultures viewed aging with this same ambivalence? In this Very Short Introduction Nancy A. Pachana discuss...

Every day the newspapers lament the problems facing our children - broken homes, pressures to eat and drink, the stress of exams. The same issues are discussed in every pub and at every dinner party. But is life really more difficult for children than it was, and if so why? And how can we make it better?This book, which is a result of a two year investigation by the Children's Society and draws upon the work of the UK's leading experts in many fields, explores the main stresses and...

Clinical Reflexology takes the practitioner on a journey of examination, critical review and debate prior to making recommendations for best practice in reflexology. The phenomenal rise in interest by health professionals in Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), and in particular touch therapies, has led to a need for texts that relate and integrate theory and practice to health care settings. Clinical Reflexology does this, expanding and exploring concepts introduced in the first ...