Lay Evaluation of Medicine and Medical Practice: Report of a Pilot Study

Abstract

Sociologists appear to differ in the way they portray the public's ideas about modern medicine. Some argue that the public accepts that modern medicine is effective, and others say that as a whole the public is skeptical about its value. There is a dearth of empirical evidence about what the public thinks of modern medicine; this pilot study attempts to fill this gap. Tape-recorded interviews were carried out with small samples of women from Social Classes I and II and Classes IV and V to find out what they felt about the value of modern medicine and to identify the criteria that they used to assess a “good” and “bad” medical practitioner. The results showed that there is some degree of skepticism about the value of modern medicine, particularly amongst working-class people. However, the criteria for assessing the performance of a medical practitioner were only rarely seen to be tied up with the criteria used to assess the value of modern medicine.