Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Concepts of health and disease
- Part II The experience of illness
- Part III Illness and society
- 9 Intersex, medicine and pathologization
- 10 Stigmatizing depression: folk theorizing and “the Pollyanna Backlash”
- 11 Doing health: a constructivist approach to health theory
- 12 Beauty and health as medical norms: the case of Nazi medicine
- Bibliography
- Index
11 - Doing health: a constructivist approach to health theory
from Part III - Illness and society
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Concepts of health and disease
- Part II The experience of illness
- Part III Illness and society
- 9 Intersex, medicine and pathologization
- 10 Stigmatizing depression: folk theorizing and “the Pollyanna Backlash”
- 11 Doing health: a constructivist approach to health theory
- 12 Beauty and health as medical norms: the case of Nazi medicine
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
Health is important to us, but it remains difficult to get a conceptual grip on the term “health”. Health still often appears as Gadamer described it: a clandestine (and therefore not configurable) gift and “wonder of absentmindedness” (Gadamer [1993] 1996: 126, my translation). With the rise of “surveillance medicine” (Armstrong 1995), however, a great deal of effort focuses on health promotion and disease prevention, especially in public health. As a consequence, the “clandestine gift of health” is more often conceived as self-made, not given, and a risk diagnosis frequently replaces one of a manifest disease as a cause for medical attention, although risk reveals vulnerability, not disease. How can this situation be conceptualized?
In the following chapter, the situation of women with a genetic disposition to develop hereditary breast and ovarian cancer is introduced as a starting point for the examination of different health theories, followed by a proposal of a constructivist understanding of health.
BRCA-POSITIVE WOMEN: A CASE STUDY OF RISK AND DANGER
BRCA-positive women: life with chronic risk
BRCA represents the breast cancer genes (BRCA1 and BRCA2) associated with a familial cancer syndrome called hereditary breast and ovarian cancer (HBOC). HBOC includes the accumulated occurrence of different types of breast and ovarian cancers as well as a number of less common cancers (colon, prostate, skin and pancreas), linked to family-specific DNA variations at these two DNA sites.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Health, Illness and DiseasePhilosophical Essays, pp. 197 - 210Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2012