ABSTRACT
This chapter characterizes different narratives of personalization and touch on alternative approaches to personalized medicine. However it highlights some alternative ways of rethinking health and medicine with reference to ideas about social practices, which have already gained traction in work done in reconceptualizing conditions such as obesity. In Britain and the United States, if not elsewhere, challenging behavioural models such as rational choice theories and everyday assumptions about personal responsibility are difficult in the current political and cultural climate. However, faced with the decline of welfarist approaches to health and with neoliberalism in the ascendency, finding a way to re-imagine the relationship between health, medicine and society remains as pertinent today as it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. The focus on personalization, with the dangers of discounting important social and economic practices which also determine health and wellbeing, needs to be challenged by social science.
