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Health Information Set
coordinated by
Céline Paganelli and Viviane Clavier
Volume 5
Information Practices and Knowledge in Health
Edited by
Céline Paganelli
Viviane Clavier
First published 2022 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd
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John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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© ISTE Ltd 2022
The rights of Céline Paganelli and Viviane Clavier to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s), contributor(s) or editor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of ISTE Group.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021949036
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-611-1
Introduction
This collective work, the fifth in the series Health Information, brings together eight contributions. It deals with health information and communication and highlights strong trends or “movements” in the field of health, which consist of many dimensions to be articulated in order to approach knowledge and information practices.
A first movement involves the growing visibility of health issues in the public space, an observation that dates back more than 20 years, as shown by issue 95 of the French journal Réseaux published in 1999 on “Science, the sick and the public space”. This issue focused on patients and patient organizations that had acquired legitimacy in the public arena, thus contributing “to a new way of thinking about the relationship between science and the general public”. This relationship, according to the authors [CAR 99, p. 10] “[was] less of an asymmetrical relationship of expertise and pedagogy, but rather [allowed for] the expression of scientific uncertainties, the sensitive involvement of caregivers or the claims of patients” [ibid.]. The media appear to be the key players in this publicizing of health issues. As early as the 1980s, television relayed appeals for donations or compassion for the Telethon [WAL 98]; the “media coverage” of AIDS or the story of contaminated blood provided the opportunity for “tests of strength” between the political, medical and judicial arenas, as well as for the internal tests of strength in the journalistic field on the “legitimate definition of information” [CHA 94]. Beyond the media space, society as a whole is, according to the health sociologist Pierre Aïach [AÏA 98] and the anthropologist, sociologist and doctor Didier Fassin [FAS 98], going through a process of medicalization that they consider to be a cultural transformation. Protecting ourselves and fighting against illness, detecting and preventing risks, staying healthy, etc. have become a constant preoccupation, elevated to the rank of a movement: healthism [CRA 82]. This “concept”, which emerged during the 1970s and 1980s, refers in particular to the Foucauldian thesis according to which individuals come to adhere to social norms of their own free will, even though they are not forced to do so. According to Hélène Pouliquin, healthism is recognized as “an elevation of health to the rank of virtues and morality, accompanied by an individual duty to maintain health by making individuals responsible, even if at the same time the state disengages from acting on the social, political and economic determinants of health” [POU 15, p. 26]. Promotional discourse and consumer practices are part of this trend, as Benoit Lafon shows with another neologism he calls “sanitarization” to indicate, once again, a double movement perceptible in the “consumer press” [LAF 20]: on the one hand, the consideration of public health issues in entire sectors of the economy, which, beyond agriculture, concern various industrial activities such as agri-food, chemistry or electronics. On the other hand, the increasing consumerization of healthcare is manifested in the growth of medical devices, “reimbursed” by complementary health insurance organizations in competition with each other (glasses, hearing aids, etc.), or by the ever-expanding dynamics of the drug industry towards other areas to be medicalized (well-being, smoking, etc.). This same tendency can be found in food, as attested by a third neologism coined in 2009 by the food sociologist Jean-Pierre Poulain [POU 09]. Thus, the “nutritionalization” of food refers to the management of food in the context of
