Medical Anthropology最新文献

Sensations have emerged as an increasingly important topic in anthropological studies of health and disease. In this article, I draw from ethnographic research conducted among people living with selected rare inherited metabolic diseases (IMDs) and their caregivers in Poland, focusing specifically on recurrent rhabdomyolysis, a long-term complication that affects energy-consuming organs and muscles. Employing insights from sensorial and medical anthropology, I examine how people with IMDs and their caregivers, as parent-patient units, build anticipatory sensorial knowledge that enables them to attend to bodily sensations symptomatic of elevated creatine kinase levels, which are characteristic of rhabdomyolysis.

Based on an ethnography of a Chinese village, this article examines the re-stigmatization of recovered COVID-19 patients in China's COVID-19 response between 2020 and 2022. I show that distrust in the local government was reactivated in epidemic governance and led to the production of localized knowledge as a proactive response to official knowledge, which prompted stigma driven by health concerns. As the epidemic governance intensified alongside viral mutations, the stigma was reconfigured into a broader threat to livelihoods. This research indicates stigmatization is a complex and nuanced process shaped by the interplay between epidemic governance and local social dynamics.

In an era of increasing interest in self-monitoring technologies to improve population health, this article considers how participants in a public health trial engaged with such technologies. Exploring how their engagement sits with the logic of self-monitoring and the technology of the trial highlights that the trial's blackboxing of its objects of study obscure the deeply contextualized care practices through which such technologies "work." Attending to (self-)care and what the trial neglects offers a means of disrupting entrenched values in its objects, relations, and logics, questioning what is important and for whom through a critical anthropology of/through health technology.

In this article, I explore connections of reproductive coercion and surveillance care through ethnographic research conducted at two independent abortion clinics in North Carolina from 2018 to 2019. Examining the lived experiences of those who seek abortion care shows how patients navigate surveillance during the clinical encounter to receive care. Patients experiencing reproductive coercion often need to maintain existing social ties, involving the providers as mediators to ensure their preferred outcome. Because patients may only receive care if they express an autonomous decision for abortion, providers often observe and negotiate specific social-relational cues, draw-specific ethical conclusions about patient autonomy, and act accordingly.

Health sovereignty - the assertion of rights to culturally and ecologically appropriate medicines and the ability of communities to structure their own healthcare - is a biopolitical goal of the Rastafari movement. We examine how health sovereignty is enacted by Rastafari herbalists in south London and the contributions these healers make to health in the UK, particularly for migrants disenfranchised by "hostile environment" immigration policies. Using ethnographic data on "bitters" and "roots tonics" we show how herbal medicines are used by healers and their clientele to achieve key political and spiritual aims of the movement, as well as personal healing.

Beyond the laws, different institutions watch over - or veille sur - the access to and practice of medically assisted reproductive care in France. Although a shift in the moral regimes underlying French reproductive governance can be observed, ART practices are monitored through surveillance mechanisms, the economic and medical nature of which conceals their normalizing function. Woman and couples who do not correspond to these norms are prevented from forming a family through the French ART system. In this article we show how, faced with this reproductive exclusion, French women and couples choose to undertake cross-border reproductive care in an attempt to circumvent surveillance and fulfil their reproductive desire.

We revisit a time in 2021 when people in the UK were coming to terms with an unwanted future characterized by chronic COVID-19 infection. Drawing on experiences of people who had already experienced COVID-19 infection, we explore how they made sense of newly perceived vulnerabilities and the possibility of reinfection. We highlight the work of speculating about the future, which involved making "educated guesses" based on embodied knowledge as understanding about different consequences of "living with COVID-19" moved in and out of view.

Exploring the relationship between governmental infectious disease management and emergency systems, I examine the turn to emergency in European measles management during the resurgence of the disease between 2017 and 2020. While measles management was shaped by hope for disease eradication and as a progressive pursuit of elimination, amid growing concerns with vaccination coverage, hope was redirected toward reversing regression in the struggle against infectious disease. I argue that perception of and action on public health issues as emergencies is intricately tied to change in the fundamental construct of governmental infectious disease management, regardless of change in the disease or its categorization.

The moral terrain of caring in a social work context is often treacherous. During ethnographic fieldwork with front-line workers at an organization providing services for unhoused individuals in a U.S. city, respondents articulated a relational intimacy required in client care. However, they also recognized the limits of their endurance and their need for distance from others. In this article, we suggest that Paul Ricoeur's "little ethics," in contrast to first-person or poststructuralist approaches to ethics, captures these workers' experience more fully and allows us to see the forging and negotiation of moral relationships of care and shared vulnerability more clearly.

This research asks what is being put to the test by breast and gynecological cancer predisposition testing in Spain beyond genes or cancer. By combining document analysis and fieldwork with national healthcare professionals and drawing on the anthropology and sociology of testing, I examine how the molecular relations of these tests extend to the political economy of the national healthcare system. I show how the capacity of these tests to produce a low-risk collective has paradoxical consequences for the political economy of the national healthcare system, unsettling professionals' concerns and spotlighting what is prioritized in personalized medicine strategies.