Health and finance: exploring the parallels between health care delivery and professional financial planning

This article compares the role of risk and uncertainty discourse across two rather disparate areas of expertise: personal financial planning and health care delivery. On the basis of 42 semi-structured interviews and eight recorded meetings between planners and their clients, as well as a comprehensive review of extant health literature, it is argued that three points of convergence – the discursive management of uncertainty, the temporalization of risk, and the use of images – offer a modicum of certainty which functions ultimately to legitimize expertise and facilitate courses of remedial action while simultaneously assuaging laypeople’s existential anxieties. The article concludes with a number of reflections on the importance of agency and trust.