Sociology of health & illness最新文献

Religious commitment has long been associated with health and happiness in the United States. However, despite a period of drastic decline in religious affiliation among Americans, much less is known about how nonreligious commitments promote wellbeing. We use novel measures that capture variation among the nonreligious to assess whether aspects of nonreligious experience might replicate religion's health-promoting features. We analyse how wellbeing among the nonreligious is impacted by nonreligious identity (e.g., atheist and agnostic), but also by nonreligious identity duration, involvement in nonreligious organisations and affective orientation to being nonreligious. Using a national survey of Americans (2020), we analyse how these different aspects of nonreligious identity and experience predict three measures of wellbeing: self-reported health, happiness, and life satisfaction. We find that the primary factor predicting wellbeing among the nonreligious is whether they experience their nonreligion as comforting or anxiety-producing (affective orientation), and our findings suggest that whether nonreligious people find comfort or anxiety in their nonreligion changes over time and is shaped by their participation in nonreligious organisations. We discuss the implications of our findings for scholarship on religion and wellbeing as well as for future research on variation in wellbeing among nonreligious Americans.

Based on ethnographic observations of hospital video consultations between clinicians and patients, this article investigates the shifting places of care when consultations are displaced from the clinic. While information and communication technologies allow care across distance, scholars within science and technology studies (STS) and sociology have demonstrated how places still matter to the delivery of healthcare services. However, as healthcare increasingly enters the digital realm, we need a vocabulary and analytics which also address virtual environments' constitutive effects as places of care. This article argues that place must be understood as more than the locations of the consulting parties and be expanded to include the virtual places created during video consultations. Drawing on insights from STS and computer-supported cooperative work, the concept of hybrid place is proposed to capture the spatial hybridity of video consultations when physical locations are virtually connected and projected into virtual environments. The concept becomes a useful heuristic for understanding the spatial reconfiguration of the place of care during video consultations; it brings attention to the multiplicity of places, their connections and their distinct conditions which co-shape the virtual clinical encounter.

Evidence suggests that exercise may be an effective adjunct to recovery processes associated with addiction; however, little research has been conducted outside clinical settings. This article is based on a Canadian carnal sociological study that investigated the evolution of the runner's habitus amongst 11 individuals in recovery from addiction through mobile methods, specifically running interviews, with data deductively analysed through conceptual categories. Running offered a lifestyle structure that supported a nonlinear healing process, fostering connections that stood in stark contrast to the disconnection that had previously characterised their lives. Findings suggest that running may offer an organising structure for those seeking to alter their use of substances, though perhaps specifically amongst those with previous histories of exercise.

The urgency of addressing climate change has accelerated the need for healthcare to mitigate its associated environmental harms. Co-benefits approaches are being used in policymaking to frame mitigation actions because they promise to deliver better health outcomes alongside environment benefits. Despite this, little empirical data exists on public perceptions about the acceptability and usefulness of this approach. We conducted 12 focus groups with 82 members of the UK public asking the question: what were participants' values, beliefs and experiences about the environmental harms associated with healthcare and how should these issues be conceptualised and addressed? Co-benefits framings resonated with participants, who perceived this approach as useful for prioritising healthcare needs while valuing the environment. However, when participants tried to frame co-benefits as a solution, they struggled to reconcile complexities. Furthermore, their discussions revealed a certain subjectivity and context-specificity in co-benefits framing, drawn from their own experiences and expectations of care. We emphasise paying attention to such subjectivities when developing co-benefits policies. This could be achieved by the inclusion of public and patient voices in policymaking. Any underlying assumptions associated with co-benefits policies-including which subjectivities are used in the framing and how tensions are resolved-must be made transparent.

Automation and AI-driven decision support systems are increasingly reshaping healthcare, particularly in diagnostic and clinical management contexts. Although their potential to enhance access, efficiency and personalisation is widely recognised, there remain ethical concerns especially around the shifting dynamics of healthcare relationships. This article proposes a conceptual framework for understanding the relational ethics of healthcare automation, drawing on the work of Levinas and Silverstone to interrogate the ethical implications embedded in regulatory processes. Focusing on the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) database, we analyse clinical decision support system (CDSS) approvals to examine how healthcare relationships are discursively constructed within regulatory documentation. Through close reading of these technical and administrative texts, we investigate how ethical concerns such as patient autonomy, informed consent and trust are acknowledged or elided. Our findings reveal a limited framing of relational dimensions in regulatory discourse, raising important questions about how ethics are operationalised in the oversight of automated systems. By making visible the administrative practices shaping healthcare automation, this study contributes to emerging debates on AI governance and the ethical integration of automation into clinical practice.

This study examines the functions and ambivalences of the diagnostic model for trans healthcare in Japan. Drawing on interviews with 18 trans healthcare seekers, it explores how diagnosis operates not only as a medical requirement but as a socially embedded practice shaping access to care and self-understanding. Although often used expediently to obtain treatment, diagnosis also serves as a site of exploration or endorsement. This study identifies an additional layer of ambivalence-rooted in the structural imbalance of explanatory authority-beyond existing accounts of strategic navigation. Diagnosis may offer reflection and confirmation of identity and needs, but it also risks producing epistemic injustice by undermining individuals' authority to define their own experiences. The resulting ambiguity of validation-dependency, alongside the illness-care conundrum, creates an epistemic contradiction: the same diagnostic process that grants access and affirmation may also constrain self-determination. This study contributes to the trans health scholarship by foregrounding the interpretive work of trans healthcare seekers and critically analysing diagnosis as a practice of both regulation and care.

Substance use disorder is highly stigmatised despite its contemporary medicalisation. Because of the criminalisation of substance use, parents with substance use disorder must often navigate recovery while interacting with the criminal legal and child welfare systems. Restitution narratives of illness do not sufficiently capture the recovery experiences of parents with substance use disorder whose recoveries may better align with a quest narrative. This study uses qualitative photovoice discussion data to examine the recovery narratives constructed by parents with substance use disorder as they navigate institutional and interpersonal obligations. Using template analysis of 23 transcripts from photovoice group sessions with 29 individuals who have substance use disorder, we find that criminal legal system and child welfare system obligations limit participants' ability to fully engage in the recovery process. Carceral institutions act as a barrier to substance use recovery and parenting capacity by conferring punitive consequences that prioritise restitution. Parents in recovery must navigate these restitutive institutions while seeking self-improvement and using their lived experiences to rebuild community with their families. Understanding parental recovery experiences may inform the improved design and implementation of parenting and behavioural health supports available to help break intergenerational cycles of trauma and addiction.

For many living with chronic illness, COVID-19 is a compounding health crisis. Although a few studies have focused on the experiences of those living with chronic illness, this is the first to prioritise the voices of women living with chronic illnesses during the pandemic. Engaging Puig de la Bellacasa's (2017) writings on 'matters of care', this paper draws upon interviews with 13 women living with (their own or others) chronic illness to reveal multi-spatial and temporal understandings of care, from self-care to the everyday acts of care by family, friends and strangers, to changing understandings of care alongside shifting governmental policies. In so doing, this paper highlights the varied ways women living with chronic illness made meaning of risk and vulnerability during the various stages of the pandemic, and how the pandemic shifted material, embodied and affective ways of knowing care. It also reveals the women's experiences of care as powerfully shaped by intersecting systems of oppression, marginalisation and discrimination. Underpinned by a feminist ethic of care, this paper amplifies the lived experiences of chronically ill women, reconsiders what we might have (un)learnt about care during the pandemic and calls for care-based approaches as a way forward for future crises.

The incursion of the financial sector into contemporary politics, economies and societies has been noted, yet financialisation remains under-explored in the sociological study of healthcare. Using the case of Maharashtra, India, and a qualitative research approach combining policy documents, witness seminars and in-depth interviews, we offer an account of how financialisation has been facilitated and enacted in this sector. We analyse the restructuring of a healthcare system in favour of corporate chains and calculative logics, with concomitant changes including closure and takeover of smaller hospitals and re-modelling of not-for-profit hospitals along corporate lines. We highlight ways in which such financialisation of healthcare, and its sidelining of health needs, has significance for care processes, professional dynamics, access to care and the parameters of regulatory systems.

The article explores the role of algorithmic procedures in the implementation of the programme of precision medicine (PM), currently pursued in molecular tumour boards (MTBs) that emerged from the confluence of previous tumour boards and the increasing molecularisation of medicine. Our observation of the deliberations in MTBs, confirmed by interviews with participants, shows that the crucial contribution of algorithms in all stages of the processing of molecular data is neither acknowledged nor mentioned. One reason, we argue, is that these highly innovative technologies are very distant from the traditional skills and training of clinicians. The mediation through MTBs provides algorithmic procedures with the viability required to be implemented in medical decisions-and is more effective the more it goes unnoticed. Contrary to the widespread assumption of a blurring boundary between research and care, we claim that the intensification of contacts and exchanges among research endeavours and clinical operations makes the separation between the two fields increasingly sharp. As a consequence, there is a need for new forms of translation, which are accomplished by MTBs.