ABSTRACT
These days we are continually being encouraged to become more self-conscious about our health by a loose coalition of political, economic, and moral interest groups which often have more than just our health in mind. Exhortations to stop smoking, eat bran, and use condoms are being proclaimed in the context of a massive reduction in public spending, loss of faith in overtly political movements as a source of social change, the reassertion of individualism, and a moral panic about AIDS. But while social workers individually may, as caricature sometimes suggests, value apparently healthy lifestyles for themselves, social work as an institution has failed to come to grips with what this might mean for practice; perhaps understandably, given resource constraints, administrative structures, and interprofessional rivalries (Simpkin 1989). Sniping by social workers at the failures of the health services and the medical model has not generally been matched by a willingness to take the responsibility for thinking through the implications of a commitment to multidisciplinary work. In this paper I want to examine some differences in value terms between social work and medicine, and in particular to suggest that the new approach to health emphasizes old conflicts or raises new ones in ways which cannot be resolved in terms of professional values alone.
