5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

The teaching of sociology in undergraduate and postgraduate of healthcare professionals’ education has gone from “nice to know” to “need to know” in recent decades. However, teaching sociology to health professionals is an experience of existing and not belonging, that is, of participating in training and not belonging to their fields of practice. There are reports of structural impediments, such as the reduced number of professionals for teaching sociology, difficulties in developing activities in institutions that, for the most part, consider health sociology themes irrelevant and hidden curriculum practices that reproduce prejudices among health professionals. Additionally, it has become common practice to teach sociology under disguised names. The most striking fact regarding these difficulties is that they were identified decades ago and have not yet been overcome, on the contrary, in some cases they are intensifying. The objective of this session is to discuss experiences, challenges and opportunities of teaching sociology in the training of healthcare professionals. The aim is to discuss the teaching of sociology to: understand the social aspects of health, illness and care; the construction of a sociology with health, based on sociology in medicine and sociology of medicine; and the participation of sociology in the training of critical-reflective health professionals on the processes of medicalization and pharmaceuticalization and others. Also welcome are reports about estrangements, assimilations, embarrassments, ambivalences and other notable events in the experience of teaching sociology to healthcare professionals.