she OVERCOMING ESTRANGEMENT, DISTANCE AND DISCREDITING BY BUILDING CRITICAL AND REFLEXIVE BRIDGES BETWEEN SOCIOLOGY AND MEDICAL SCIENCES

Abstract

The processes of health/discomfort are represented in our social world from an epidemiological perspective. The manual Sociología de la salud: salud, malestar y sociedad desde una mirada crítica offers us the opportunity to approach these processes from another perspective, that of critical sociology. If sociology is the science that questions taken-for-granted reality, this manual aims to make us question what we take for granted in the processes of health/discomfort, starting with the unquestionable authority of the medical system to describe, categorise and treat these processes. From the critique of the biomedical system derive the two main themes that articulate this book: the conceptualisation of health and illness as social and sociological facts, and the conceptualisation of the body beyond the physiological and individual. These themes run through the 11 chapters that make up the manual in a continuous dialogue between the macro-social, mesosocial and micro-social dimensions.