Medical Anthropology最新文献

Osteopathy is a complementary treatment method that targets motor restrictions and enhances motility through touch. While recent studies have explored the functions, dimensions, and effects of touch in osteopathy, there is a lack of research on how touch renders bodies intelligible - or what bodies, for that matter. In this article, we use the verb to affect/to be affected to explore how bodies become known by and to Dutch osteopaths, and how the senses play a role in this. Our analysis shows how touch allows osteopaths to affect and be affected by their patients' bodies - as well as by their own.

Drawing on three years of ethnographic engagement with the rare disease community in the United Kingdom and Europe, this article explores the experiences of families who seek and (sometimes) receive a genomic diagnosis. I trace how families learn to enact unexplained symptoms and common disabilities as rare, genetic disorders, and how they coordinate genomic and non-genomic ways of "doing" disease within and beyond the clinic. These experiences shed light on the socio-material processes through which genomic variants become "diseases" (or fail to do so), and on the implications for those whose lives have become entangled with the genomic agenda.

Starting from the unsettling ambiguity of the aborted but not-quite-dead fetus, I scrutinize how clinical staff interpret, decide on, and grapple with fetal life signs following disability-selective pregnancy terminations in Austria. Understanding their practices as attempts to provide certainty in a context of ontological and moral uncertainty, I conceptualize them as acts of care that contribute to an intricate "ontological careography" and facilitate classifying the not-quite-dead as an already-dead fetus. I show that the interpretation of life signs is not a simple matter of biological "facts" - what is ultimately at stake is the active making of life and death.

Shamans, neo-shamans, atheists, and others describe gaining special knowledge from drinking ayahuasca, supporting the cross-cultural idea of ayahuasca as a plant teacher. While secular enthusiasts interpret this metaphorically, animists and others take it literally. This article examines ontological collisions at a healing retreat in the Peruvian Amazon, considering Shipibo shamans and their international clients. It explores how embodied experiences, such as purging and visions, inform both literal and metaphorical views of healing and illness. By addressing incommensurable ontologies, the article highlights how a polyontological framework approaches ontological collision without necessarily privileging specific ways of knowing.

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.

The introduction of personalized medicine marks a shift in pregnancy-related screening, from fetal to maternal health risks putting the pregnant woman's future orientations center stage. Drawing on fieldwork from pregnancy outpatient clinics and 11 interviews with pregnant women diagnosed with gestational diabetes and offered genetic testing, we use their experiences of time to explore how futurity is reshaped by notions of early detection and at-riskness. We offer the concept of "future prism" to capture how multiple situations of orienting toward the future shape and circumscribe one's experience of the future - an orientation that makes genetic testing almost impossible to refuse.

This ethnographic exploration of death in the Peruvian context draws on fieldwork among abandoned-both by their families and the state-older adults in a shelter for the homeless in Lima, Peru. I examine the conditions and local forces that shape the ways people at this institution socially and physically die. My argument is that people in this long-term care facility who have lived entire lives on the margins, usually, end up having irrelevant deaths to their families, other residents of the institution, and the Peruvian state. At this shelter, dying in an irrelevant way means dying without companionship from family members and receiving poor and flawed care from the institution that shelters them.

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.