The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice

The logic of care: health and the problem of patient choice by Annemarie Mol London: Routledge, , pp, £ paperback ISBN
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In this innovative and compelling book, Annemarie Mol argues that good care has little to do with 'patient choice' and, therefore, creating more opportunities for patient choice will not improve health care. Although it is possible to treat people who seek professional help as customers or citizens, Mol argues that this undermines ways of thinking and acting crucial to health care.

Illustrating the discussion with examples from diabetes clinics and diabetes self care, the book presents the 'logic of care' in a step by step contrast with the 'logic of choice'. She concludes that good care is not a matter of making well argued individual choices but is something that grows out of collaborative and continuing attempts to attune knowledge and technologies to diseased bodies and complex lives.

Mol does not criticise the practices she encountered in her field work as messy or ad hoc, but makes explicit what it is that motivates them: The Logic of Care: Health and the problem of patient choice is crucial reading for all those interested in the theory and practice of care, including sociologists, anthropologists and health care professionals. It will also speak to policymakers and become a valuable source of inspiration for patient activists.

Mol hints at how education, farming and other production systems might be re-oriented along healthcare lines. This book has the brevity and profundity of a manifesto. Mol shows why patients need a relational logic of care, and how the increasingly pervasive logic of choice is inappropriate to living with disease. This book, filled with accessible clinical examples, will be of particular value to anyone in the caring professions, to administrators and policy makers, and to ill people who seek a serious reflection of what care they need.

Through her perceptive observations and detailed stories, we readers are introduced to the inner workings of the logic of care, and come to see more clearly the inadequacy of the "logic of patient choice.

Maybe he feels awful and fears he will never be released from hospital. Take time for him, let him talk. Based on long-term ethnographic research with people suffering from diabetes, and fused with real clinical examples, Mol carefully details the ways that a logic of choice has upended health systems, while arguing for a relational logic of care that is oriented to the everyday lives of those living with disease.

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Summary Summary written by — Laurie Denyer Willis —. One doctor, however, gives an altogether different answer, pointing away from questions of autonomy and choice, and instead towards the need for patient care, saying: Essential Reading Presenting summaries of, and links to, relevant books and journal articles on the topic of antimicrobials in society. Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic.