Medical sociology and health policy: where are the connections?

The attempt to assess the impact of medical sociology on health policy encounters operational difficulties regarding what should be counted. After reviewing these difficulties, we argue that there is potential interest among policymakers for sociological contributions to policy debates, but that policy impact has been limited by sociologists' ambivalence, academic career considerations, and by health research becoming a distinct field of research. Suggestions for increasing sociologists' policy impact include attending to policy relevance in both the design of studies and the dissemination of results and by sociologists' becoming more oriented to the field of health policy research.