Quality and Importance of Health Policy, Reform, and Public Health Topics

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-98
Author(s):  
Frances M. Angerer-Fuenzalida
Author(s):  
Alan Cribb

This chapter discusses one of the most important ideas shaping health-policy reform and debate: personalisation. It should be said that there is nothing new about individualising or tailoring healthcare. Clinical healthcare, unlike some aspects of population or public health, is always already ‘targeted’ healthcare. However, both technological and cultural changes mean that possibilities and expectations of the degree of ‘tailoring’—to people's bodies, on the one hand, or to people's values and/or life circumstances, on the other—have substantially expanded and intensified. Depending upon how it is interpreted, personalisation can be presented as contributing to both medicalising and de-medicalising currents of healthcare change. It can be used to refer to closer attention and responsiveness to individual biology. It can also be used to refer to closer attention and responsiveness to individual biography. The chapter then presents a very rough distinction between ‘personalised medicine’ and ‘personalised care’.


1995 ◽  
Vol 21 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 241-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc A. Rodwin

Owen Barfield, the British solicitor and literary scholar, reminds us that many legal concepts have their origin as metaphors and legal fictions. We often fail to see the nature of legal metaphors, Barfield argues, because over time they ossify and we read them literally rather than figuratively. Look closely at changes in law over time, Barfield advises us, to see how effectively metaphor works in law and language. Many legal categories and procedures we now use had their origin in using a metaphor that revealed a new way of looking at a problem or that helped solve a legal problem. Legal metaphors also help us to identify critical limits and strains in adapting to new facts and circumstances.George Annas has pointed out that our choice of metaphors for medicine can reframe our debates about health policy reform. And Analee and Thomas Beisecker remind us that patient-physician relations have been viewed through many metaphors. These include parent-child relations (paternalism); seller-purchaser transactions (consumerism); teacher-student learning (education); relations among partners or friends (partnership or friendship); or rational parties entering into negotiations or contracts (negotiation or rational contract).


2009 ◽  
Vol 68 (12) ◽  
pp. 2256-2262 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Ramesh ◽  
Xun Wu

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