Over the last twenty years, type 2 diabetes skyrocketed to the
forefront of global public health concern. In this book, Mari
Armstrong-Hough examines the rise in and response to the disease in
two societies: the United States and Japan. Both societies have
faced rising rates of diabetes, but their social and biomedical
responses to its ascendance have diverged. To explain the emergence
of these distinctive strategies, Armstrong-Hough argues that
physicians act not only on increasingly globalized professional
standards but also on local knowledge, explanatory models, and
cultural toolkits. As a result, strategies for clinical management
diverge sharply from one country to another. Armstrong-Hough
demonstrates how distinctive practices endure in the midst of
intensifying biomedicalization, both on the part of patients and on
the part of physicians, and how these differences grow from broader
cultural narratives about diabetes in each setting.