The right to convalesce
An extended period of fatigue is a feature of COVID-19, lingering and depleting the body and the mind long after the acute symptoms of infection have come and gone. Fatigue is not just present in what we refer to as...
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Purity and danger in pandemic public health
A socio-historical take on fear messaging Public health strategies to encourage compliance and behaviour change during the pandemic have been criticised for applying behavioural theories like “nudge theory” to induce fear. The Independent Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-B)...
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Understanding Health Inequalities in Scotland – Getting Beyond Death and Despair in (Quantified) Data
Two high profile reports on health inequalities in Scotland were launched last month. The first, Leave No One Behind(a Health Foundation report), aimed to provide a multi-dimensional, up-to-date analysis of health inequalities in Scotland. The second, Closing the Gap (from...
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Lucky strike
In 1888 the match girls of Bryant and May match factory in London went on strike, after years of discontent and triggered by the unfair dismissal of a worker in the July of that year. Workers were not unionised, employed...
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Break a leg! Observations on continuity of care
I’ve been thinking about continuity of care. The advantage of continuity of care was taken for granted in traditional, community based general practice where the family doctor got to know people, in their own context, over time. Seeing the same...
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Why nurses should be paid the same as neurosurgeons
This December, nurses will be striking nationwide for the very first time in UK history. The official campaign is calling for a pay rise of 5% above inflation to ensure nurses no longer have to rely on foodbanks, or make...
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Scales of failure: mental health services and self-harm
Reflections on the CVNI conference and the weight of knowledge I was recently at a two-day meeting of lived-experience experts and service user/survivor researchers in mental health. The event, organised by the Critical Voices Network Ireland was energising, exciting, and...
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Universal credit changes: increasing pressure on part-time workers is the wrong move at the worst time
Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng has laid out the government’s “mini budget”, a package of tax cuts that will mostly benefit the wealthiest in Britain. But people on the other end of the income scale are facing changes too. Kwarteng announced that...
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Whose side are we on? Reflections on the FHSI book prize shortlist
Four excellent recent books, all shortlisted for the FHSI Book Prize shortlist, illustrate different approaches to the question of who we write for. Howard Becker’s 1967 call for sociologists to be on the ‘side of the underdog’ was not advocating...
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Saving lives from the picket line – the limits of declaring a Cost of Living Emergency
The latest figures around cost of living are, of course, obscene. Inflation is due to peak at 13% in October 2022, the highest annual rate since 1982. From June 2021 to June 2022 domestic gas prices increased by 95% and...
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Depression is probably not caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain – new study
For three decades, people have been deluged with information suggesting that depression is caused by a “chemical imbalance” in the brain – namely an imbalance of a brain chemical called serotonin. However, our latest research review shows that the evidence...
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Artificial Intelligence and Medical Sociology