Healthcare Activism

Healthcare Activism
Author: Susi Geiger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2021-09-09
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 019263450X

What is the role of activists and civil society in defining and defending the collective good in healthcare, especially in cases where that good seems to be heavily shaped by market dynamics? Presenting conceptual and empirical studies from a variety of healthcare contexts and theoretical perspectives, this book addresses this vital question by drawing together multidisciplinary scholarship from Science and Technology Studies, Sociology, Organisation Studies, Marketing, Philosophy, and Public Health. Healthcare has undergone three major changes over the past decades: the advent of personalized medicine, the marketization of public care systems, and the digitalization of healthcare services. This book maps these changes and illustrates the extent to which they are interlinked to produce a seemingly unstoppable move toward individualization in healthcare. The book also highlights the tensions and challenges arising from these interlinkages, and traces how activists react to these tensions to argue for and defend the common good. It thus sketches a multifaceted picture of healthcare activism in the 21st century as civil society responds to these dynamics at the crossroads of markets and morals, economic and social justifications, individual and collective, and digital and non-digital worlds. Crucially, it also highlights potential solutions for heightening patient voices and broadening participation in healthcare markets in a post Covid-19 world.

Health Activism

Health Activism
Author: Glenn Laverack
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2013-01-11
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1446291928

Activism is action on behalf of a cause, action that goes beyond what is conventional or routine and is relative to the actions by others. Health activism is a growing area of interest for many who work to improve health at both national and international levels because it offers a more direct approach to achieve lasting social and political change. This book, for the first time, provides a clear foundation to the theory, evidence-base and strategies that can be harnessed to bring about change to improve the lives and health of others. For anyone working to improve the health of groups and communities, this will be thought-provoking reading. It has particular relevance for postgraduate students and practitioners in public health and health promotion.

Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired

Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired
Author: Susan L. Smith
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2010-08-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0812200276

Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired moves beyond the depiction of African Americans as mere recipients of aid or as victims of neglect and highlights the ways black health activists created public health programs and influenced public policy at every opportunity. Smith also sheds new light on the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment by situating it within the context of black public health activity, reminding us that public health work had oppressive as well as progressive consequences.

Women's Health Advocacy

Women's Health Advocacy
Author: Jamie White-Farnham
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2019-07-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0429574967

Women’s Health Advocacy brings together academic studies and personal narratives to demonstrate how women use a variety of arguments, forms of writing, and communication strategies to effect change in a health system that is not only often difficult to participate in, but which can be actively harmful. It explicates the concept of rhetorical ingenuity—the creation of rhetorical means for specific and technical, yet extremely personal, situations. At a time when women’s health concerns are at the center of national debate, this rhetorical ingenuity provides means for women to uncover latent sources of oppression in women’s health and medicine and to influence matters of research, funding, policy, and everyday access to healthcare in the face of exclusion and disenfranchisement. This accessible collection will be inspiring reading for academics and students in health communication, medical humanities, and women’s studies, as well as for activists, patients, and professionals.

Patients as Policy Actors

Patients as Policy Actors
Author: Beatrix Hoffman
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2011-07-20
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0813550858

Patients as Policy Actors offers groundbreaking accounts of one of the health field's most important developments of the last fifty years--the rise of more consciously patient-centered care and policymaking. The authors in this volume illustrate, from multiple disciplinary perspectives, the unexpected ways that patients can matter as both agents and objects of health care policy yet nonetheless too often remain silent, silenced, misrepresented, or ignored. The volume concludes with a unique epilogue outlining principles for more effectively integrating patient perspectives into a pluralistic conception of policy-making. With the recent enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, patients' and consumers' roles in American health care require more than ever the careful analysis and attention exemplified by this innovative volume.

Health Care for Some

Health Care for Some
Author: Beatrix Hoffman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2012-09-15
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0226348032

The 2010 Affordable Care Act is a sweeping reform to the US health care system. Hoffman offers an engaging and in-depth look at America's long tradition of unequal access to health care. She argues that two main features have characterized the US health system: a refusal to adopt a right to care and a particularly American type of rationing. Unlike rationing in most countries, which is intended to keep costs down, rationing in the United States has actually led to increased costs, resulting in the most expensive health care system in the world.

Before AIDS

Before AIDS
Author: Katie Batza
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2018-02-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812294998

The AIDS crisis of the 1980s looms large in recent histories of sexuality, medicine, and politics, and justly so—an unknown virus without a cure ravages an already persecuted minority, medical professionals are unprepared and sometimes unwilling to care for the sick, and a national health bureaucracy is slow to invest resources in finding a cure. Yet this widely accepted narrative, while accurate, creates the impression that the gay community lacked any capacity to address AIDS. In fact, as Katie Batza demonstrates in this path-breaking book, there was already a well-developed network of gay-health clinics in American cities when the epidemic struck, and these clinics served as the first responders to the disease. Before AIDS explores this heretofore unrecognized story, chronicling the development of a national gay health network by highlighting the origins of longstanding gay health institutions in Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles, placing them in a larger political context, and following them into the first five years of the AIDS crisis. Like many other minority communities in the 1970s, gay men faced public health challenges that resulted as much from their political marginalization and social stigmatization as from any disease. Gay men mistrusted mainstream health institutions, fearing outing, ostracism, misdiagnosis, and the possibility that their sexuality itself would be treated as a medical condition. In response to these problems, a colorful cast of doctors and activists built a largely self-sufficient gay medical system that challenged, collaborated with, and educated mainstream health practitioners. Taking inspiration from rhetoric employed by the Black Panther, feminist, and anti-urban renewal movements, and putting government funding to new and often unintended uses, gay health activists of the 1970s changed the medical and political understandings of sexuality and health to reflect the new realities of their own sexual revolution.

All Health Politics Is Local

All Health Politics Is Local
Author: Merlin Chowkwanyun
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2022-05-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1469667681

Health is political. It entails fierce battles over the allocation of resources, arguments over the imposition of regulations, and the mediation of dueling public sentiments—all conflicts that are often narrated from a national, top-down view. In All Health Politics Is Local, Merlin Chowkwanyun shifts our focus, taking us to four very different places—New York City, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Central Appalachia—to experience a national story through a regional lens. He shows how racial uprisings in the 1960s catalyzed the creation of new medical infrastructure for those long denied it, what local authorities did to curb air pollution so toxic that it made residents choke and cry, how community health activists and bureaucrats fought over who'd control facilities long run by insular elites, and what a national coal boom did to community ecology and health. All Health Politics Is Local shatters the notion of a single national health agenda. Health is and has always been political, shaped both by formal policy at the highest levels and by grassroots community battles far below.

Womanist AIDS Activism in the United States

Womanist AIDS Activism in the United States
Author: Angelique Harris
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2022-01-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1793636524

Womanist AIDS Activism in the United States: “It’s Who We Are” is an in-depth exploration of AIDS advocacy work among Black women. Based on interviews gathered from thirty-six Black women AIDS activists from across the nation, Angelique Harris and Omar Mushtaq examine the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, and spirituality influence the motivations and approaches behind the efforts of the women in the study. The authors use womanism—an epistemological framework that centers the world views of women of color—to better situate this activism within a larger sociocultural and historical context. They find that identity, spirituality, emotions, and experiences with AIDS knowledge all influence the ways in which these activists approached their community activism work. The authors analyze womanism in detail and propose ways in which this framework can be applied more broadly in examinations of community engagement among women of color, and specifically Black women.