The invention of patient-centred medicine

This article, based on a plenary presentation to the 13th biennial conference of the European Society for Health and Medical Sociology, challenges the implicit theme of the meeting, that radically changing societies have significant impacts on health and well-being. This analysis, it is argued, masks the fact that it is the ways in which we construe health and well-being that makes a major contribution to what we understand by ‘radically changing societies’.