First, Do No Harm shows how health care professionals, with the best intentions of providing excellent, holistic health care, can nonetheless perpetuate violence against vulnerable patients. The essays investigate the need to rethink contemporary healthcare practices in ways that can bring the art and science of medicine back into sorely needed balance.
These ground-breaking studies by noted scholars question commonly held assumptions in contemporary healthcare that underlie oppressive power dynamics and even violence for patients and their families. The contributors discuss such topics as women and violence, life-support technologies, and healthcare professionals’ own experiences as patients. First, Do No Harm opens the discourse for reaching new understandings, from reassessing the meaning of "quality of life" to questioning the appropriateness of the very language used by healthcare professionals. It will be welcomed by healthcare workers and by scholars in nursing, medicine, and the allied health sciences.
Christie Kiefer vividly brings home the meaning of poverty in peoples’ lives as he examines both their access to—and their lack of—health care.
Aimed at both students and professionals in the field, this book argues that individuals serving the poor have the means and obligation to address the root causes of ill health of the poor, not just the symptoms. These causes, Kiefer argues, are overwhelmingly social and political. In a ringing indictment of the factors that perpetuate poverty, he declares that the work of healing at its best must include advocacy.
Health Work with the Poor offers to both health workers and activists a wealth of practical information. Kiefer’s trenchant analysis of the factors that help cause and perpetuate poverty offers students the needed intellectual framework not only to accomplish short-term change but also to strive toward long-term social advocacy. Each chapter ends with a set of discussion questions—a real boon for instructors. Appendices on Internet resources for the study of poverty and on a proposed program detailing how to teach health workers in a way that promotes social awareness make this book a valuable resource for courses on poverty and health. It will also be an indispensable manual for all those who work with the poor.
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