MedSoc Annual Conference:  Plenary Sessions

Professor Evan Willis “Climate Change and Medical Sociology”   Evan Willis is Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean (Regions) at La Trobe University in Melbourne. Born in New Zealand, he has spent his working life in Australia with stints in Canada, the UK (de Montfort University), Norway and New Zealand. He has taught medical sociology as well as public health for more than 30 years and at various times advised governmental inquiries especially in the medical technology assessment field. His Ph.D. entitled ‘Medical Dominance’ (1982) was awarded the Jean Martin Prize for the best thesis in Sociology in Australasia in a two year period. The book of the same name (1983, rev edn 1989) was in 2003 voted by peers as one of the ten most influential books in the history of Australasian sociology. In 2006, he edited a special edition of the journal Health Sociology Review entitled ‘Medical Dominance Revisited’. He is also well known for his primer on the discipline of Sociology entitled ‘The Sociological Quest’ (first published in 1993) which has four Australasian editions, an international as well as a Norwegian edition (with Aksel Tjora). It features in the Wikipedia entry for Sociology. His broad interests in medical sociology lie in the health care workforce, medical technology assessment, genomics, complementary and alternative medicine, rural health, and more recently the heath implications of climate change.

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Professor Joan Busfield “Is the treatment needed? Identifying the unnecessary and inappropriate use of medicines”   In the context of the enormous expansion in the use of medicines over recent years, this paper explores the possibilities of identifying unnecessary and inappropriate medicine use. Taking Cochrane’s classic discussion of tonsillectomy as a starting point, it begins with an examination of the assumptions underpinning the standard cost-benefit framework that is usually employed when considering whether treatments are being used necessarily and appropriately.  It considers in particular the concept of medical or health need, including the extent to which needs are socially constructed, and then further explores the question of identifying the unnecessary and inappropriate use of medicines, by examining a number of different cases, delineating different types of unnecessary use.    Finally, it considers the costs, both financial and social, of unnecessary and inappropriate use, both to the health and well-being of the patient, and to the health services, as well as the steps that might be taken to reduce such use.   Joan Busfield is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex.  She initially trained as a clinical psychologist and then moved into sociology via research on the social determinants of family size, published with Michael Paddon as Thinking about Children: Sociology and Fertility in Post-war England (CUP, 1977).  Much of her subsequent work has focused on mental illness and psychiatry as well as on health and illness and the health services more generally.  Books in this area include Managing Madness: Changing Ideas and Practice (Hutchinson, 1986); Men, Women and Madness: Understanding Gender and Mental Disorder (Macmillan, 1996) and Health and Health Care in Modern Britain (OUP 2000).  Whilst continuing to publish in the area of mental health, she has also been researching the pharmaceutical industry and its impact on health care – see for instance, ‘Pills, power, people: sociological understandings of the pharmaceutical industry’ (2006) Sociology, 40: 297-314.

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