Dr. Alexis Paton
Medical sociologist and bioethicist.
I am very pleased to announce that my new book, Understanding Health, Illness and Society: A Patient-Centred Approach to Healthcare is out in December and available for pre-order now: https://amzn.to/3WQhQsf (affiliate link).
Dr Alexis Paton is an academic writer and social science communicator and commentator.
For almost two decades she has studied how people make decisions about health. A medical sociologist, medical ethicists and public health researcher, her work focuses on better understanding how inequality, ethics and policy shape our health and the healthcare we receive.
To provide practical and workable solutions, her work bridges research and real-world impact—from influencing national health guidelines, to making complex health issues understandable through media, writing, and her Sick Society podcast.
An advocate of community-led research, Alexis is passionate about working directly with communities and stakeholders to create a fairer, more ethical healthcare system for everyone.
Research belongs to everyone. Get in touch with Alexis if you would like to work together, hear about her work, learn how to engage with the public about your own work or chat about health in the media.
About Me
I’m Dr. Alexis Paton — a medical sociologist and bioethicist who looks at how society, ethics, and healthcare all connect. I study things like how patients make decisions, why health inequalities exist, and how ethics shape the care people receive. My goal is to help make health systems fairer, more transparent, and better for everyone.
About the Book
Health isn’t just about medicine—it’s about the world we live in. Scratch below the surface and just how much that world influences our health is revealed. Behind the glass doors of hospitals, patients wait for treatments delayed by funding cuts. In tower blocks and houses across the country, families struggle with damp housing and insecure jobs. Across towns and cities, life expectancy varies by postcode.
So what is happening to our health?
This book begins with a simple but powerful idea: everything in society influences our health. From the homes we inhabit to the policies that govern us, from cultural norms to political decisions, health is shaped by forces far beyond biology. Yet these connections often remain invisible—until we start asking the right questions.
Understanding Health, Illness and Society explores how our understanding of “health” has shifted over the last century, and why definitions matter. It uncovers the social forces—poverty, class, gender, ethnicity, housing, employment—that determine who gets sick and who stays well. Along the way, it examines public health campaigns, commercial influences and the politics of resource allocation, revealing how power and policy influence the health of nations.
To bring these ideas to life, it uses real-world case studies from the UK, the US, and Canada—stories that show how theory meets practice, and how lives are shaped as much by systems as individual choice. Whether you’re a healthcare student, policy-maker, a professional, or simply curious about the hidden links between society and well-being, this book offers a fresh lens on one of the most urgent questions of our time: what does it take to build a healthy society?
