'Risk' has been a fruitful seam for sociological enquiry about health and illness, generating theoretical understanding of the links between cultural analysis of modernity and the ways in which individuals makes sense of, and act in the face of, threats to their health. However, as both a topic area of research and a way of framing our understanding of how people deal with uncertainty and misfortune, it has become what could be called a 'second order' object of enquiry: we are no longer interested in risk per se (how it is managed, perceived, utilised) but in which domains it may be salient, or what the implications are of particular discursive evocations of 'risk'. Drawing on empirical work in the areas of food safety and road safety, this paper identifies some limitations of locating research within the field of risk. It may be time for the sociology of health and illness to abandon an over-reliance on theoretical accounts of risk for framing empirical studies.