In an undergraduate class I’m tutoring, we recently discussed the definition of health, and one of the first suggestions from the class emphasized that health encompasses not only physical health, but also mental and emotional wellbeing.

Since moving to Scotland, I have become increasingly interested in participative policymaking processes. In contrast to more traditional ‘top-down’ methods, wherein elected representatives develop and implement policy in largely insular fashion, participative policymaking offers relevant stakeholders a ‘seat at the table’.

From outer space this world appears borderless, a vast expanse of land populated by organisms ranging from the microscopic to the gigantic. Sharing the same space, it is easy to imagine how humans, animals, and pathogens are intertwined in a perpetual cycle of life and death.

During December 2014, I experienced my own geeky pre-Christmas anticipation as I eagerly awaited the publication of the new NICE guidance on antenatal and postnatal mental health. For those of you who aren’t afflicted with my UK maternity care and clinical guidance obsession, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) publishes recommendations that influence UK healthcare practice and policy, amongst other things.

As a US-raised Ph.D. anthropologist studying families affected by dementia in London, I am working on coming to terms with cultural differences in understanding healthcare between the UK and US.

How do we determine who is at risk of disease? How beneficial is it to our health, to be assessed as  ‘at risk’? The parameters of what puts an individual at risk seems, to me, to be constantly evolving. It is an exhausting task to even attempt to keep up with the identification of new risk factors. But is this knowledge of risk beneficial for our health?

As a researcher in psychology, my days are often spent meeting strangers who have agreed to take part in my research. Mostly it’s an enjoyable experience, and you can meet the most unusual and eccentric individuals. And yet, despite the uniqueness of each encounter, it always begins and ends the same way: A greeting, a handshake, and a wave.

Problematizing the distinction drawn between the spheres of science and religion, this fieldwork report considers portrayals of physical healing within a Baptist church and assesses the extent to which the categories of faith healing and biomedicine are considered mutually exclusive within the church context.

The pharmaceuticalisation of health supports the assumption that a ‘magic pill’ can effectively treat or control any social, behavioural or bodily conditions. I explore the contribution of patients, doctors and pharmaceutical companies to such pharmaceuticalisation of health, while keeping in mind that other actors such as governments and professional institutions are also involved.

In this piece, Lillian critiques a recent NHS England policy that has led to doctors getting paid extra for diagnosing dementia in their patients. The author articulates important insights in her assessment, addressing both healthcare and social policy implications, and finishes by proposing a potential way forward. 

Energy coursed through my body during the opening address at the Royal College of Midwives Conference in November. Warwick criticised the UK government for its decision to deny NHS midwives the 1% pay increase that had been recommended for NHS staff, while increasing pay for MPs by 10%

This week saw the latest incarnation of the Bob Geldof charity juggernaut that is Band Aid, with the 1984 single ’Do They Know It’s Christmas’ being updated and re-recorded by a new generation of musicians and pop stars. And Bono.

The Ebola River has meandered through the Democratic Republic of Congo for eons, yet only recently has its name burst beyond its banks to flood the world. When the Ebola virus was first discovered in 1976 in a village close to the River’s banks it received little global attention or funding to find a treatment or cure.

Can illness only be defined as the human experience of symptoms and suffering? I personally think there is more to illness, more to the experience, and more positivity which can be taken from it.

Like it or loath it, the ice bucket challenge was a massive success for Motor Neuron Disease (MND) associations. As of September, the challenge had raised over £6million for the UK MND Association and a cool $100million for the American ALS Association.

Having spent the past several months writing up a Master’s dissertation on Actor-Network Theory and its potential for expanding and developing the field of cybercrime research, I have had the eternal social science student experience of watching as an exciting, newly devoured work of social theory worms its way throughout my consciousness.

The post I write today is personal. And it is about an experience that is becoming increasingly personal for a growing number of people and families, globally.  This post concerns the growing prevalence of Alzheimer's among our elderly. 

A recent commentary in BJOG highlighted the likelihood of UK courts supporting pregnant women in their attempts to resist unwanted medical procedures, whilst acknowledging the continued use of forced caesarean sections for severely mentally ill women.

Compared to previous ideas about material poverty, which dominated the poverty discourse up until the 1980s, and which are still prevalent in developing countries, the concept of social inclusion has been viewed as more appealing in describing poverty in contemporary post-industrial societies.

On June 5th 2014, Quebec became the first province in Canada to legalize medical aid in dying, defined as ‘an act that involves deliberately causing the death of another person to put an end to that person’s suffering’. This phrasing carefully avoids the negative stigma associated with the term euthanasia, which literally means ‘good death.’

We've all encountered mental illness in some form or another. Maybe someone in your family suffers from depression, or someone from your school was rumoured to by “crazy”, or perhaps you are convinced that the homeless man on the sidewalk who yells a lot has schizophrenic paranoid delusions 

Science is a tricky thing to describe. Definitions can be reductionist; for example, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary states that science is “knowledge about, or study of, the natural world based on facts learned through experiments and observation”.

The #nomakeupselfie ‘trend’ that occupied our Facebook news feed for a few weeks in March created a social network phenomenon which in true social ‘trending’ style faded as quickly as it had began. The temporality of the craze itself was insulting, as was the general concept of the nomakeupselfie.

Just over 50 year ago the Royal College of Physicians published the ‘Smoking and Health’ report which stated the fatal health implications associated with tobacco consumption. However in 2011, it was estimated that 10 million adults still smoke cigarettes in the UK alone.