Health & Risk

In this chapter, I review current research on health and health care. In the opening section I consider the importance of risk in the development of health care, especially the ways in which the medical profession has used it to establish a dominant role, and the development of epidemiology as the main method of health risk analysis. The in second section I examine the current health risk agenda. In the third section I review four areas of health risk research: patient safety, medical knowledge, risk communications, the media. In the final section I identify two emerging areas of risk research, trust, and health futures.