Revisiting Robert Crawford's ‘Healthism and the Medicalization of Everyday Life’

This special issue revisits Robert Crawford's influential 1980 paper 'Healthism and the medicalization of everyday life' to reassess its conceptual value for contemporary medical sociology. We show how healthism emerged from 1970s US struggles to reconcile behavioural risk, environmental determinants and political-economic uncertainty, crystallising as an ideology that individualises responsibility while obscuring the social conditions of health. We then examine how the conceptual elasticity of the term has allowed it to proliferate across diverse empirical contexts, giving rise to three dominant contemporary iterations: healthism as a form of health-status discrimination; healthism as pathological overidentification with health; and consumerist, antimedical variants aligned with 'health freedom' cultures. Across these cases, healthism illuminates persistent-and largely unresolvable-tensions between individual agency and structural determinants of health. We argue that, despite conceptual drift, healthism remains a productive analytic lens for understanding the politics, contradictions and cultural authority of health in the present moment.