Medical Anthropology最新文献

I explore the experience of managing type 1 diabetes with wearable technology. Type 1 diabetes is a chronic illness which requires continuous maintenance to keep the blood glucose levels within range. Using autoethnography, I investigate both the practices of translating information from technology and from senses, and also from health authorities, into practices. I conclude that the management of type 1 diabetes is informed by an urge to control the body, but this situation can be understood otherwise from a logic of care.

We draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Brussels (Belgium) on the health care experiences of undocumented migrants. We explore the implications of the double position of the ethnographer, who is both a researcher and a practicing doctor. We describe how the intimate knowledge the ethnographer-cum-clinician holds about the health care system influenced and shaped the data collection, analysis and subsequent policy recommendations. We examine the ethical dilemmas in conducting research from an engaged position about care practices toward vulnerable populations in one's own professional field. We conclude with recommendations on how to challenge and interrupt complexities faced by multi-positioned ethnographers.

Practice theories offer potential to reveal, understand, and attribute value to the everyday thoughts and actions of dementia caregivers. Drawing on ethnographic data from research in rural South Africa, on everyday dementia care practices, we highlight the profound importance of mundane practices - especially "sitting in wait" - for optimizing wellbeing of people with dementia who are cared for at home. We draw attention to the structural drivers of homebased (informal) care, which is underpinned by state inaction. This situates the act of sitting in wait as both an act of care and an embodied form of structural powerlessness.

In a tragically ironic twist, antiretroviral therapy (ART) that promised an end to AIDS ushered in a syndemic of viral cancers, transforming hope to despair. In this article we draw from the illness narratives of HIV positive women attending a cervical cancer screening clinic in Johannesburg, South Africa, and chart their pathways from HIV to cancer, and their quest for treatment. Our interlocutors described protracted struggles to access surgical procedures to prevent the onset of cervical cancer. Dealt a double blow of HIV and cervical cancer, women's narratives reveal the intersections of exposure to pathogens and the precarity of hope.

The social efficacy of vaccines has been a central concern around COVID-19 vaccine uptake rates. As partners on the Vaccinate West Michigan Coalition, we conducted a rapid ethnographic assessment project among adults living in West Michigan. Three case studies are presented to convey the nuanced context around decisions with a focus on the influence of fear, trust, and the ripple effect of healthcare workers' (HCW) beliefs around vaccines. While HCWs' attitudes and beliefs influence their patients, the unique contribution of this study is its focus on how HCWs' perceptions influence friends and family members.

Drawing on fieldwork in Facebook support groups, in this article I explore how people, now patients, learnt to live with Barrett's esophagus, a risk state or "precancer" for a type of esophageal cancer. This diagnosis brought the possibility of both facing and averting cancerous futures into the present. Far from passive recipients, members worked to foreground speculations of "wanted futures" in which prompt surveillance successfully prevented cancer deaths, transforming cancer risk into an opportunity for hope. Speculation here was an ambivalent and active process, involving not only the "observation of potentiality," but the opening up and foreclosing of both desirable and undesirable potentialities.

In today's China, countless parents embark on a journey of moral peril in search of treatment for their children with autism, navigating a bustling yet chaotic market of therapies. Based on 13 months of fieldwork in the Pearl River Delta, this study examines how the boom of China's autism therapy industry has plunged parents, who are relentlessly striving for their children's futures, into deeper vulnerability. I view the "ethics of trying" as parental enactment of their moral agency in seeking therapy and reveal how it serves as a moral engine for the industry's growth in the early 21st century, as well as how it leads to moral tragedies for parents as new norms of therapeutic choice emerge with government and professional guidance compelling them to make optimal therapeutic choices within a critical developmental window. Although parental efforts to avoid "agent-regret" can paradoxically lead to significant remorse, the moral tragedy they encounter can also prompt reflection and reevaluation of their approach to their child's condition.

A growing concern in clinical literature with the "treatment burden" of living with multimorbidity raises questions about how we can study and produce knowledge on the impact of health care. In this article, we draw on ethnographic material from fieldwork among people with multimorbidity in Denmark and recent theorization on "values" in health care, to show how an ongoing "trying out" and ways of "just getting on with it" are enacted in illness trajectories marked by multimorbidity. Our findings point to the importance of attending to the subject positions that particular healthcare relations and encounters make possible.

Pregnancy is seen as a window of opportunity for health interventions, with the potential to produce long-term health changes for mother and child. The RCT FitMum investigates the effects of different regimes of physical activity during pregnancy. We suggest that rather than hitting a window of opportunity, the trial works in choreography with different timescapes through the processes of management of time. These timescapes are characterized by linear progression and futurity, alongside composite, complex time. We reconceptualize the intervention as a navigation of flows and passages in collective efforts, providing a situated and sustainable approach to interventions.

Diabetic foot (DF) is a leading cause of nontraumatic lower-extremity amputations, premature death, and a sign of social inequality in diabetes treatment. In Mexico, the incidence of DF is on the rise yet little is known about its impact among indigenous people, a disadvantaged group. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Oaxaca and analysis of institutional health-data, in this article we show the health care delays that rural indigenous people face when dealing with DF. Indigenous people's uncertainty regarding their right to health and the structural barriers to medical care favor DF complications, a phenomenon that should be read as social suffering. Since health data concerning indigenous health care service users is patchy and imprecise, indigenous people's social suffering is invisibilized. This omission or partiality in the official records limits public health decision-making and undermines the human rights of the population.