Main description:

Over a decade after medical sociologist Phil Brown called for a sociology of diagnosis, Putting a Name to It provides the first book-length, comprehensive framework for this emerging subdiscipline of medical sociology. Diagnosis is central to medicine. It creates social order, explains illness, identifies treatments, and predicts outcomes. Using concepts of medical sociology, Annemarie Goldstein Jutel sheds light on current knowledge about the components of diagnosis to outline how a sociology of diagnosis would function. She situates it within the broader discipline, lays out the directions it should explore, and discusses how the classification of illness and framing of diagnosis relate to social status and order. Jutel explains why this matters not just to doctor-patient relationships but also to the entire medical system. As a result, she argues, the sociological realm of diagnosis encompasses not only the ongoing controversy surrounding revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in psychiatry but also hot-button issues such as genetic screening and pharmaceutical industry disease mongering.
Both a challenge and a call to arms, Putting a Name to It is a lucid, persuasive argument for formalizing, professionalizing, and advancing longstanding practice. Jutel's innovative, open approach and engaging arguments will find support among medical sociologists and practitioners and across much of the medical system.

Contents:

Foreword, by Peter Conrad
Preface
Introduction: What's in a Name?
A Place for a Sociology of Diagnosis?
An Avenue for Understanding
1. Lumping or Splitting: Classification in Medical Diagnosis
The Aims of Classification
Classification of Diseases
Classification Systems
Revealing Classificatory Politics in Diagnosis
2. Social Framing and Diagnosis: Corpulence and Fetal Death
Corpulence
Fetal Death
Frame and Be Framed
3. What's Wrong with Me? Diagnosis and the Patient-Doctor Relationship
Illness and Disease
Medical Authority
Changing Roles in Diagnosis
What Next?
4. Beyond Our Ken? Contested Diagnoses and the Medically Unexplained
Medically Unexplained Symptoms
Discovery of Disease
Whose Diagnosis?
Splitting from Diagnosis?
5. Driving Diagnosis: Peddlers and Pushers
Engines of Diagnosis
Female Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder
Discussion
6. "There Is Nothing So Small as to Escape Our Inquiry"
Technologies of Diagnosis
Technology and Diagnostic Categories
Technology and the Diagnostic Process
Screening
Hope
Conclusion: Directions for the Sociology of Diagnosis
Creation
Application
Allocation
Exploitation
Moving Forward
Notes
References
Index