Establishing credibility, constructing understanding: The epistemic struggle over healthy eating in the Finnish dietetic blogosphere
What constitutes healthy eating is experiencing ongoing public debate, and this debate is increasingly taking place on the Internet. In this article, using a dialectical approach to analyse rhetorical discourse, we investigated how six highly popular Finnish nutrition counselling bloggers construct dietetic credibility and understanding. Their argumentation is compared to that of two academic experts contributing to the blog of the National Institute for Health and Welfare. Theoretically, we draw on Michael Billig’s notions on how thinking and understanding are pervasively argumentative and reflect wider socio-cultur...
Source: Health: - June 29, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Huovila, J., Saikkonen, S. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Emoting infertility online: A qualitative analysis of mens forum posts
This article then offers insights into how men experience infertility emotionally, negotiate the emotional challenges involved (especially pertaining to diagnosis, treatment outcomes and their intimate relationships) and how they share (and find value in doing so) with other men the lived experience of infertility. (Source: Health:)
Source: Health: - June 29, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Hanna, E., Gough, B. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Beyond medicalization: Self-injuring acts revisited
This article describes and analyzes the medicalization of self-injuring acts and argues a need to move research on self-injuring acts out of the medical paradigm. There is a need to explicitly explore the impact of social, cultural, structural, and gendered factors surrounding and influencing self-injuring acts. A non-medical approach, beyond the limits of the medical perspective, would feed research forward and create a more nuanced view on this widespread social phenomenon. (Source: Health:)
Source: Health: - June 29, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Ekman, I. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Balancing exercises: Subjectivised narratives of balance in cancer self-health
Having a ‘balanced lifestyle’ is often promoted as one way to manage the competing demands of contemporary life. For people with cancer, those demands are often multiplied, particularly when they use self-health approaches that seek to bring together an array of biomedical and complementary and alternative medicine therapies and practices. Yet, how balance is used in this complex healthcare milieu and the affects it has on experiences of illness are less well understood. In order to follow the polyphonic narratives involved, two case studies of women with breast cancer who used cancer self-health approaches wer...
Source: Health: - June 29, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: MacArtney, J. I. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Factors facilitating patient satisfaction among women with medically unexplained long-term fatigue: A relational perspective
Bodily conditions that are difficult to identify, explain and treat with the aid of medical knowledge and technology appear to be particularly challenging to medical encounters. Patients are often dissatisfied with the help they receive, and they often experience that their medical needs are not met. To explore factors facilitating patient satisfaction among patients with a medically unexplained condition, we ask: what is the importance of individual versus relational factors in facilitating patient satisfaction in clinical encounters between general practitioners (GPs) and women with medically unexplained long-term fatigu...
Source: Health: - May 1, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Lian, O. S., Hansen, A. H. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
HIV positive men as fathers: Accounts of displacement, ir/responsibility and paternal emergence
This study employed in-depth semi-structured interviews and Foucauldian-informed discourse analysis to explore the accounts of six self-identifying heterosexual fathers (four Black African migrants, two White European) who had been living with HIV from 5 to 24 years. While the HIV-related literature calls for the need to subvert ‘traditional’ expressions of masculinity as a means of promoting HIV prevention and HIV health, we argue that the lived experience for HIV positive men as fathers is more socially, discursively and thus more psychologically nuanced. We illustrate this by highlighting ways in which HIV p...
Source: Health: - May 1, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Highton, S., Finn, M. D. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Empirical population and public health ethics: A review and critical analysis to advance robust empirical-normative inquiry
This article reviews the philosophical debates related to the ‘empirical turn’ in clinical bioethics, and critically analyses how PPHE has and can engage with the philosophical implications of generating empirical data within the task of normative inquiry. A set of five conceptual and theoretical issues pertaining to population health that are unresolved and could potentially benefit from empirical PPHE approaches to normative inquiry are discussed. Each issue differs from traditional empirical bioethical approaches, in that they emphasize (1) concerns related to the population, (2) ‘upstream’ polic...
Source: Health: - May 1, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Knight, R. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
'Whos coming up next to do this work? Generational tensions in accounts of providing HIV care in the community
Generational change is believed to be transforming the educational and employment preferences of medical trainees. In this article, we examine generational tensions in interviews with policy leaders and clinicians on workforce issues within one subset of the Australian medical profession: general practitioners who provide care to people with HIV in community settings. Integrating the accounts of policy leaders (n = 24) and clinicians representing the ‘first generation’ (n = 21) and ‘next generation’ (n = 23) of clinicians to do this work, shared and divergent perspectives on the role of generational...
Source: Health: - May 1, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Newman, C. E., de Wit, J. B., Reynolds, R. H., Canavan, P. G., Kidd, M. R. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
'A necessary evil that does not "really" cure disease: The domestication of biomedicine by Dutch holistic general practitioners
Against the background of studies about the domestication of complementary and alternative medicine into biomedical settings, this article studies how biomedicine is integrated into holistic settings. Data from 19 in-depth interviews with Dutch holistic general practitioners who combine complementary and alternative medicine with conventional treatments demonstrate that they do not believe that conventional biomedicine ‘really’ cures patients. They feel that it merely suppresses the physical symptoms of a disease, leaving the more fundamental and non-physical causes intact. As a consequence, they use convention...
Source: Health: - May 1, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Raaphorst, N., Houtman, D. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Proud2Bme: Exploratory research on care and control in young womens online eating disorder narratives
This article analyses illness narratives posted on a Dutch eating disorder website hosted by a treatment centre. Specifically, we look at ‘care of the self’ and ‘control’. The young women wrote about controlling situations with disordered eating as a self-care tool, about being controlled by the disorder and about regaining control over the disorder. The website, with the opportunity for constant, unseen supervision, coercion through comments, and steering through edits and comments, revealed various modalities of control. While issues of control and eating disorders have been explored by others, li...
Source: Health: - May 1, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Hipple Walters, B., Adams, S., Broer, T., Bal, R. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Reconceptualising public acceptability: A study of the ways people respond to policies aimed to reduce alcohol consumption
This study, based on focus groups conducted in England, examines the ways people responded to, and made sense of, policy ideas aimed at reducing alcohol consumption. Although effective policies were supported in the abstract, specific proposals were consistently rejected because they were not thought to map onto the fundamental causes of excessive drinking, which was not attributed to alcohol itself but instead its cultural context. Rather than being influenced by the credibility of evidence, or assessed according to likely gains set against possible losses, such responses were established dynamically as people interacted ...
Source: Health: - May 1, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Cohn, S. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Integration of acupuncture into conventional medicine from health professionals perspective: A thematic synthesis of qualitative studies
Acupuncture is a prominent Complementary Medicine. Although health professionals’ conceptions of acupuncture may affect its utilisation and integration within conventional medicine, these aspects have not been well studied. The aim of this review was to analyse the integration of acupuncture into conventional medicine from the perspective of health professionals.
We conducted a systematic review and a thematic synthesis of qualitative studies that analysed the integration of acupuncture into conventional medicine grounded in participants’ perspectives. A systematic search was undertaken in PubMed, Web of Scienc...
Source: Health: - February 24, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Garcia-Escamilla, E., Rodriguez-Martin, B., Martinez-Vizcaino, V. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
"Hell no, theyll think youre mad as a hatter": Illness discourses and their implications for patients in mental health practice
This article examines how discourses on mental illness are negotiated in mental health practice and their implications for the subjective experiences of psychiatric patients. Based on a Foucauldian analysis of ethnographic data from two mental health institutions in Denmark—an outpatient clinic and an inpatient ward—this article identifies three discourses in the institutions: the instability discourse, the discourse of "really ill," and the lack of insight discourse. This article indicates that patients were required to develop a finely tuned and precise sense of the discourses and ways to appear in front of p...
Source: Health: - February 24, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Ringer, A., Holen, M. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
The significance of socially-assigned ethnicity for self-identified Maori accessing and engaging with primary healthcare in New Zealand
Despite increased focus in New Zealand on reducing health inequities between Māori and New Zealand European ethnic groups, research on barriers and facilitators to primary healthcare access for Māori remains limited. In particular, there has been little interrogation of the significance of social-assignment of ethnicity for Māori in relation to engagement with predominantly non-Māori primary healthcare services and providers. A qualitative study was undertaken with a subsample (n = 40) of the broader Hauora Manawa Study to examine experiences of accessing and engaging with primary healthcare amo...
Source: Health: - February 24, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Reid, J., Cormack, D., Crowe, M. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Silent subjects, loud diseases: Enactment of personhood in intensive care
The topic of this article is personhood in the case of verbally inexpressive, typically unconscious patients or patients with a low level of lucidity. My aim is to show how personhood is done and undone in a close-knit network of personnel, patients, disease, technology, and treatment, borrowing the concept of enactment as developed by Annemarie Mol. The empirical data are based on grounded ethnographic fieldwork conducted in three separate intensive care units in three European countries: Spain, Norway, and France in the spring of 2014. Four weeks were spent at each site. The method used was participant observations and s...
Source: Health: - February 24, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Koksvik, G. H. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
