Medical Anthropology最新文献

Using a sociomaterial perspective based on interviews with health workers, we examine how clinic-based HIV viral load testing and early infant diagnosis technologies reshape health care realities in Papua New Guinea. The use of such technologies redefine professional roles and health care experiences by empowering health workers to translate biomedical data into client-centered clinical management, while also contributing systemic tensions, such as the paradoxical recentralizing of care and heavier workloads. Despite these challenges, health workers view these clinic-based technologies as transformative tools that support ethical decision-making, reduce preventable deaths and expand equitable health care.

#In this article I examine the roles of IVF doctors in two state-owned hospitals amid China's shift to pronatalism. Rather than simply promoting infertility treatment, some doctors act paternalistically as "moral pioneers" and "moral guardians," reappropriating moral authority granted by biomedical expertise to persuade many women of "advanced maternal age" seeking a second child through ART to reconsider or discontinue treatment. Their reasoning arises from navigating contradictory reproductive governance while drawing on personal moral values. While reinforcing state narratives on declining fertility, they also provide medical justifications for forgoing treatment, offering some women an alternative model of femininity.

In this article, I examine the uterus as an object in relation to endometriosis and the epistemological struggle of sufferers to have their pain taken seriously. Defined by endometrial-like tissue outside the uterus, endometriosis affects multiple organs, causes severe pain, and is often undiagnosed for years. While outsiders frequently describe the condition, patient voices remain marginal. Using illness autoethnography and my experience in Germany, I show how delegitimized embodied knowledge shapes the identify work of coping with endometriosis. Medical gaslighting, stigma, limited literacy, and shame increase dismissal of symptoms and vulnerability. Recognizing the gendered framings of endometriosis can reshape how people cope with it.

Pandemics are inherently disruptive, evoking uncomfortable and unsustainable emotions. We explore the emotional landscape of the COVID-19 pandemic and its normalization among vaccine hesitant residents in Oklahoma. Ontological insecurity reported at the pandemic's outset stemmed from the absence of a clear and resonant cultural script that left individuals to construct narratives in which COVID-19 came to be understood as the "New Flu." Within a backdrop of institutional distrust, participants enacted this narrative through individual health practices. The "New Flu" became a symbol that normalized ontological disruption by transforming the perception of COVID-19 as uncertain and existentially threatening into emotionally manageable.

The discovery of illicit exchanges of "highblood" among injection drug-using youths has thrown families off balance in Mufakose. In this article, I explore the (ab)use of biomedical technologies by youths in administering crystal meth as well as the healing pathways pursued by families in cases of illness. I argue that experimenting with blood complicates understandings of meth-induced behaviors because of the meanings attached to blood in the African context. The article draws upon 6 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Mufakose among 30 crystal meth-using youths. I used deep hangouts, life histories, interactive observation, and focus group discussions.

Illness is not only where colonial healthcare is experienced, but also a battleground over which worlds exist. Indigenous struggles to heal in their communities are political defenses of the more-than-human "worlds of health" vital to their well-being - a "cosmopolitics of health." Between 1996 and 2000, the Peruvian government forcibly sterilized 314,000 people, mostly Indigenous women, disrupting the biosociospiritual world of the Runa ayllu. The New Dawn for Good Living healing house in Cusco supports forcibly sterilized women in remembering and re-membering the shared body of the ayllu through a combination of allopathic and ancestral techniques. La enfermedad no es solo un espacio donde se experimenta la atención sanitaria colonial, sino también un campo de batalla sobre qué mundos existen. Las luchas de los pueblos indígenas por sanar en sus comunidades constituyen defensas políticas de los "mundos de salud" más-que-humanos, esenciales para su bienestar: una "cosmopolítica de la salud." Entre 1996 y 2000, el gobierno peruano esterilizó forzosamente a 314,000 personas, principalmente mujeres indígenas, alterando el mundo biosocioespiritual del ayllu runa. La casa de sanación Nuevo Amanecer para el Buen Vivir, en Cusco, apoya a estas mujeres a recordar y reconstituir el cuerpo compartido del ayllu mediante técnicas alopáticas y ancestrales.

Care for kidney failure in the context of rapid aging taxes society, the state, and the individual patient. Kidney dialysis is the predominant form of care for end-stage renal disease in Japan. In this article I explore how dialysis proficiency and dominance in Japan is made possible by a culture of "high touch" and paternalistic medicine, patient endurance, medicalization, socialization, and gendered care. This culture of management is both generous and demanding, making widespread dialysis possible while making extreme demands on patients, society, and the state in extreme ways. The article explores the fine lines between care and exhaustion.

Based on fieldwork in Quebec, in a home for 14 older people who were diagnosed with dementia - the Carpe Diem - the central proposal of this article is to suggest "alienation" as a way to rethink dementia care. This is based on the insight that the notion of personhood can become a fallacy of care when understood as continuity with the past and empathy, as is often the case in person-centered care. Alienation here consists of three central elements: ordinariness, prosthetics, and a critical reflection on origins, by paying attention to "what is wrong" in assemblages of care.