Medicine as Reproduced Powerlessness: Everyday Life in Czech Reproductive Medicine from the Physicians’ Point of View
Medicine as Reproduced Powerlessness: Everyday Life in Czech Reproductive Medicine from the Physicians’ Point of View

Author(s): Lenka Slepičková, Iva Šmídová
Subject(s): Evaluation research, Health and medicine and law, Demography and human biology
Published by: Masarykova univerzita nakladatelství
Keywords: Medicine; Czech Reproductive Medicine;
Summary/Abstract: Since the end of the last century, social science research in medicine has focused primarily on the transformation or disappearance of the traditional attributes associated with the medical profession. These changes, dating from the second half of the century are described using terms such as professional decline (Annandale 1998), deprofessionalisation (Haug 1972) or proletarisation (McKinlay and Stoeckle 1988). The above-mentioned concepts emphasise the different causes of changes to the medical profession, but their description of the basic features of the changes is the same. The main sources of power in the medical profession, defined by Freidson (1988), such as autonomy, specified as the ability of medicine to exercise sovereign control over its own activities, and dominance, outlined as the medical control over other professions in health care, are weakened in relation to changes in medical practice.

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