The Logic of Care Health and the Problem of Patient Choice

'The Logic of Care analyses how healthcare produces health and shows how the best healthcare is necessarily at odds with the currently dominant rhetoric of health products limited. 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.' - Professor David Healy, Department of Psychological Medicine, Cardiff University, UK

'Annemarie Mol depicts care as practices: practices of living with disease, of doctoring, and of nursing. 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.' - Professor Arthur W. Frank, Department of Sociology, University of Calgary, Canada

'Annemarie Mol has written a wise and engaging book that explores the real lives of people with diabetes and how they care for themselves and are cared for by others. 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." Anyone interested in how "care" serves as a public value should read this humane book.' - Professor Joan C. Tronto, Department of Political Science, (Hunter College of the) City University of New York, USA