 With regard to research, critics of reductionism point out that there has been an overemphasis on the pursuit of genetic or molecular level explanations of disease to the neglect of alternative levels of explanation. Further, such limitations are highly detrimental to patients, especially because there are not likely to be short-term cures or treatments for most genetic diseases, perhaps beyond avoiding having children carrying particular genes in the first instance (see for instance  Hubbard and Wald 1999), although this domain of medicine is rapidly changing as new treatments are developed and the understandings of the effects of genomic mutations improve. Focusing overly or solely on the genetic level results in a process which the sociologist Abby Lippmann (1991) terms “geneticization”, namely reducing the differences between individuals to their DNA, and in turn viewing genetics as the most promising approach to curing disease, rather than viewing people and the illnesses that they suffer at a phenotypic and much more environmentally-situated level. In addition, as Elisabeth Lloyd (2002) argues, higher levels of social organization that are culturally sanctioned have unrecognized causal effects on health, and hence medical research should not be restricted solely to the molecular level.