Your doctor is the second most important person taking care of your health. You're the first. This book was written so that you can do a better job, without going to medical school. It is designed to help you sort out the vital health information you need--what to consider, what to ignore, what to worry about, what to forget.
Deciding how to take care of a pain, an injury, a fever--and whether to call in expert advice--is not always an easy task. Knowing how to prevent disease can be even harder: Will I really live longer and feel better if I cut down on dietary fat, or alcohol, or overwork? The main focus of this book is on prevention: habits you can modify, choices you can make in daily life. Good choices do make a difference. The life expectancy of American adults has been increasing, and it is quite clear that professional medical care is not the only reason people are living longer.
But when you do call in the professionals, this book will guide you in asking the right questions about your diagnosis and treatment. When medical decisions must be made, you can be an active partner in making them.
The doctors who wrote this book have made some fundamental assumptions about their readers: they are people who want to make their own choices about their health, based on the best possible evidence; they want straightforward information unencumbered with excessive detail; when they talk with their physician, they want to ask intelligent questions and understand the answers; they want to live a long life, but also enjoy it along the way; and they want to see "the big picture"--how their personal health is affected by environmental and social forces.
While offering a critique of neoliberal health policies, Your Pocket Is What Cures You remains grounded in ethnography to highlight the struggles of men and women who are precariously balanced on twin precipices of crumbling health systems and economic decline. Their stories demonstrate what happens when market-based health reforms collide with material, political, and social realities in African societies.
The Deep South has seen a 36 percent increase in AIDS cases while the rest of the nation has seen a 2 percent decline. Many of the underlying reasons for the disease’s continued spread in the region—ignorance about HIV, reluctance to get tested, non-adherence to treatment protocols, resistance to behavioral changes—remain unaddressed by policymakers.
In this extensively revised second edition, Kathryn Whetten and Brian Wells Pence present a rich discussion of twenty-five ethnographic life stories of people living with HIV in the South. Most importantly, they incorporate research from their recent quantitative study, “Coping with HIV/AIDS in the Southeast” (CHASE), which includes 611 HIV-positive patients from North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana. This new edition continues to bring the participants’ voices to life while highlighting how the CHASE study confirmed many of the themes that originally emerged from the life histories. This is the first cohesive compilation of up-to-date evidence on the unique and difficult aspects of living with HIV in the Deep South.
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