Abstract
A vast body of literature on the Internet and healthcare has emerged over the course of the last decade. A quick search on the main bibliographic databases reveals thousands of references on the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), particularly the Internet, in medicine or healthcare. The peculiarity of this literature is that it blends a range of different disciplines: medicine, sociology, psychology, geography, IT and information studies and so on. It is tempting to see this literature as the indication of the emergence of an entirely new field of study, often referred to as e-health studies. Discussions of e-health have the advantage of being generic and of including all studies examining health and the Internet. The eEurope website provides the following definition of e-health:
… application of information and communications technologies (ICT) across the whole range of functions which, one way or another, affect the health of citizens and patients.1
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© 2013 Joëlle Kivits
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Kivits, J. (2013). E-Health and Renewed Sociological Approaches to Health and Illness. In: Orton-Johnson, K., Prior, N. (eds) Digital Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137297792_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137297792_15
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