Medical understandings of lifestyle : an interpretive study of 'lifestyle' as a medical explanatory framework

TL;DRAbstract

This thesis provides an overview of lifestyle as a medical explanatory concept, explicating contemporary medical understandings of lifestyle and situating these within a wider social and historical framework. It argues that ideas about lifestyle have a long history in medical thought but that what is meant by lifestyle and how this is seen as relating states of sickness and health has shifted according to audience and time period. This thesis also addresses the sociological critique of a lifestyle approach to health and disease. It argues that this critique has focused on medical understandings of lifestyle only as an epidemiological and public health concept. This has resulted in a neglect of wider medical understandings and the constructions of individual doctors. This lacunae in sociological knowledge is addressed through empirical investigation of wider medical understandings of lifestyle within the framework of an interpretive qualitative study of medical texts, in-depth interview

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