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Eating Right in America is a powerful critique of dietary reform in the United States from the late nineteenth-century emergence of nutritional science through the contemporary alternative food movement and campaign against obesity. Charlotte Biltekoff analyzes the discourses of dietary reform, including the writings of reformers, as well as the materials they created to bring their messages to the public. She shows that while the primary aim may be to improve health, the process of teaching people to "eat right" in the U.S. inevitably involves shaping certain kinds of subjects and citizens, and shoring up the identity and social boundaries of the ever-threatened American middle class. Without discounting the pleasures of food or the value of wellness, Biltekoff advocates a critical reappraisal of our obsession with diet as a proxy for health. Based on her understanding of the history of dietary reform, she argues that talk about "eating right" in America too often obscures structural and environmental stresses and constraints, while naturalizing the dubious redefinition of health as an individual responsibility and imperative.

Unlike earlier work in medical economics, which has focused on medical care, these ten papers stress the production and consequences of health itself. They reveal a serious concern with real-world health problems in their investigation of such subjects as infant mortality, life expectancy, morbidity, and disability. These papers are unusual, as well, in bringing to bear on these problems new and powerful theoretical and statistical tools. They draw on, and in some cases are, original sources for new bodies of data. As such, Economic Aspects of Health comprises a useful blend of relevance and rigor.

Personalized and precision medicine (PPM)—the targeting of therapies according to an individual’s genetic, environmental, or lifestyle characteristics—is becoming an increasingly important approach in health care treatment and prevention. The advancement of PPM is a challenge in traditional clinical, reimbursement, and regulatory landscapes because it is costly to develop and introduces a wide range of scientific, clinical, ethical, and socioeconomic issues. PPM raises a multitude of economic issues, including how information on accurate diagnosis and treatment success will be disseminated and who will bear the cost; changes to physician training to incorporate genetics, probability and statistics, and economic considerations; questions about whether the benefits of PPM will be confined to developed countries or will diffuse to emerging economies with less developed health care systems; the effects of patient heterogeneity on cost-effectiveness analysis; and opportunities for PPM’s growth beyond treatment of acute illness, such as prevention and reversal of chronic conditions.
 
This volume explores the intersection of the scientific, clinical, and economic factors affecting the development of PPM, including its effects on the drug pipeline, on reimbursement of PPM diagnostics and treatments, and on funding of the requisite underlying research; and it examines recent empirical applications of PPM.   
 

In 2001, Thailand introduced universal health care reforms that have become some of the most celebrated in the world, providing almost its entire population with health protection coverage. However, this remarkable implementation of health policy is not without its weaknesses. Drawing on two years of fieldwork at a district hospital in northern Thailand, Bo Kyeong Seo examines how people in marginal and dependent social positions negotiate the process of obtaining care.
Using the broader concept of elicitation, Seo analyzes the social encounters and forces that shape caregivers. These dynamics challenge dichotomies of subjugation and resistance, consent and coercion, and dependence and autonomy. The intimate and moving stories at the core of Eliciting Care from patients and providers draw attention to a broader, critically important phenomenon at the hospital level. Seo's poignant ethnography engages with feminist theory on the ethics of care, and in so doing, makes a significant contribution to emerging work in the field of health policy and politics.