Medical Anthropology最新文献

At a time of rising public interest in the human microbiome and calls for increased microbe literacy in public health, few studies have explored how different segments of the US public understand gut health. To address this gap, An exploratory ethnographic study was conducted in Southern Arizona. The study identified five themes that encompass Pasteurian militaristic and post-Pasteurian ecological perceptions of gut health, gut adaptability, and probiotic/antibiotic influence on" natural immunity." Future microbe literacy programs will need to engage with local ideas about gut health, build upon points of convergence with bioscience, and identify points of divergence that challenge public health initiatives.

Drawing on an ethnography of Nigerian migrant motherhood in London, we explore how the original design of children's health records, known as the Red Book, to log routine vaccinations has been transformed to document family proof of residency amidst Britain's "hostile environment." Nigerian migrant mothers use the Red Book as evidence of raising British children and to overcome their precarity. By resolutely documenting their children's immunizations, Nigerian mothers pursue both biological and political immunity while on a simultaneous immunization and citizenship journey.

We examine diagnostic expansion of ADHD in Israel, based on interviews with mothers who came to identify with the ADHD label after their children were diagnosed. Applying a feminist psychiatric disability perspective, we show that diagnoses reverberate in families and raise unexpected stakes, meanings, and possibilities for mothers. In particular, women's social role as mothers is central to a sense of "failure" that they associate with ADHD, as well as a main site of self-cultivation, experimentation, and change. Diagnostic expansion is thus an open-ended and relational process, implicating multiple dimensions of self over the life course.

Cystic fibrosis is a rare genetic disease that significantly reduces life expectancy. Therapy can delay the progression of the disease, but it is onerous, time-consuming and makes the disease more visible, creating a sense of not belonging to the healthy peer group that young people desperately want. Recent, very expensive advances in therapeutic interventions have dramatically reduced both the therapeutic load and the visibility of the condition. Drawing on a long-term ethnographic study in Germany, I explore how this changes the ways people with cystic fibrosis negotiate belonging, which is experienced as a metaphorical immigration into the world of the healthy.

Scholars writing about selecting gamete donors have emphasized the importance of resemblance when choosing a donor. However, while they have thoroughly researched the question of why prospective parents consider resemblance important, how resemblance is done remains unexplored. Adopting a material semiotics approach and employing ethnographic research about sperm-donor matching for and by prospective parents in the Netherlands, I argue that resemblance matching entails enacting boundaries between people deemed "similar enough" and "too different." In relational practices of (not) doing kinship and doing resemblance, race is often enacted as a relevant difference.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with people living with Turner syndrome in France, in this article we analyze the relationship between uncertainty and temporalities specific to rare diseases. We first show how the syndrome requires a work of interpretation to decipher an opaque body and the desynchronization between bodily changes and age positions. We then analyze how the delay in information and diagnosis can change the perception and consequences of the disease. Finally, we show how new treatments or biotechnologies provide new imagined futures, multiplying choices but also the risk of failure and some ethical dilemmas in the contemporary French context.

The analysis of the intersection between race and microbiome science is a growing area in the social sciences, but little scholarly attention has been given to how population categories, that often have a racial subtext when applied to the Global South, are constructed, or how they intersect with or diverge from local conceptions of race. Drawing on research on an EU-funded human microbiome project involving Italian and Tunisian researchers, I argue that population categories in microbiome research are not merely imposed, but are continuously negotiated and co-constructed with local, homegrown racial categories.

There continues to be a lot of uncertainty around childhood obesity, with biomedical and social perspectives colliding. Based on ethnographic research in Poland, we argue that the messiness of obesity as a research object and the inability of researchers and practitioners to agree on how to address it has harmful consequences. Young people are often caught between different approaches to care and health, trying to lose weight, address their obesity, recognize fat stigma, and find self-acceptance. While the status of obesity as a disease remains highly contested, young people often have to deal with these multiple contradictions on their own.

Women with the rare Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome are born without a uterus. Following international interviews with 34 women with MRKH and 15 surgeons and specialists, we explore how the usually invisible condition of MRKH is made visible and "done" through biomedicine. MRKH is highly medicalized, with much work undertaken to make MRKH bodies fit heteronormative standards. Some people with MRKH prefer to define themselves as intersex. Others undertake uterus transplants (UTx), to experience menstruation, gestation, and birth. UTx reconstructs their bodies to heteronormative expectations at the same time as it reinforces gendered identity as normative women, and potentially as mothers.