Health and media: an overview

Abstract

Why should medical sociologists study the media? Accounts of the experience of illness are common in medical sociology (see, for example, recent reviews of this field by Pierret 2003 and Lawton 2003). The information these provide has been helpful over the years in re-orienting the vision of health care providers away from a biomedical and reductionist view of patienthood, towards a more holistic understanding of the meanings of illness for those who experience it. In this way many sociologists have contributed to a more widespread construction of 'patients' (passive) as being instead 'consumers' (active), promoting recognition of the psychosocial element of biopsychosocial care. Thus the medical gaze has been extended to parts of life previously hidden from view, so that a new knowledge of illness has come to dominate thinking in certain health care arenas – perhaps particularly so in primary care and in nursing (Armstrong 1983a, 1984). In tandem with these developments has been the emergence of media and cultural studies as new disciplines. These have taken the (mass) mediated nature of personal experience to be an important topic. This can be understood as a component of the broader project of understanding what it is to be a person in late or postmodern social conditions. Thus it is very common, in these fields, to see accounts of media representations of gender, class or race (for example, Dines and Humez 2002), because these are felt to be important factors in understan…