Persuing Health and Wellness de Alexander Segall

Persuing Health and Wellness: Healthy Societies, Healthy People, 1e

Alexander Segall

Christopher Fries

This innovative new book unravels many of the prevailing mysteries surrounding the pursuit of health and wellness today. Focusing explicitly on health rather than illness, Persuing Health and Wellness analyzes the way in which health and the conditions necessary for wellness are unequally distributed within society and argues that healthy societies foster healthy people. Organized into three parts, the text examines the sociological foundations of the discipline and health as a social construct before looking at the social determinants of health; the structural and behavioural factors that influence it; and the informal and formal components of the health-care system. Students will learn about the guidelines for measuring health, while considering personal, professional, and public responsibilities in the quest for good health. Engaging and comprehensive, Pursuing Health and Wellness advocates the creation of healthy societies in which people can engage in the active pursuit of healthy living and is essential reading for all students studying the sociology of health.

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Descriere

Despite a culture pervaded by the language of health (e.g., buzz phrases like healthy living, healthy eating, healthy environments), there are many mysteries surrounding the pursuit of health and wellness. Health is often a very personal matter, protected by privacy law. Health is distributed unequally in society, as are the conditions necessary for wellness. Health is increasingly medicalized, with the goal of making people healthy lost in anxiety over the threat ofillness and the need for treatments, both biomedical and alternative. In applying the sociological imagination, Pursuing Health and Wellness: Healthy Societies, Healthy People unravels these mysteries and, in an approach consistent with a shift in health sociology itself, goes beyond an examination of health as simply the absence of disease to explore the many factors that shape health and wellness. Authors Alexander Segall and Christopher Fries have constructed a three-pronged approach to this study. Part One of the text establishes the sociological foundationsof the discipline and looks at health as a social construct. Part Two goes on to look at the social determinants of health and critically analyzes the structural and behavioural factors that influence it. Part Three examines the informal and formal components of the health-care system as well asmodels for measuring health, all the while considering personal, professional, and public responsibilities in the pursuit of health and wellness.

Notă biografică

Alexander Segall holds a PhD in health sociology from the University of Toronto and has been a faculty member at the University of Manitoba since 1971, where he currently is professor in the Department of Sociology (Faculty of Arts) and Department of Community Health Sciences (Faculty of Medicine) as well as research affiliate at the Centre on Aging. Christopher J. Fries is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Manitoba. His research interests encompass sociology of health, medicine and the body, and ethnic studies.