Education as networking: Rethinking the success of the harm reduction policy of Taiwan
In conclusion, looking at education as a form of networking offers theoretical insight that increases understanding of its participants, mechanisms, processes, and permutations. (Source: Health:)
Source: Health: - April 20, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Chen, J.-s. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
On resilience and acceptance in the transition to palliative care at the end of life
Specialist palliative care is a prominent and expanding site of health service delivery, providing highly specialised care to people at the end of life. Its focus on the delivery of specialised life-enhancing care stands in contrast to biomedicine’s general tendency towards life-prolonging intervention. This philosophical departure from curative or life-prolonging care means that transitioning patients can be problematic, with recent work suggesting a wide range of potential emotional, communication and relational difficulties for patients, families and health professionals. Yet, we know little about terminally ill p...
Source: Health: - April 20, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Authors: MacArtney, J. I., Broom, A., Kirby, E., Good, P., Wootton, J., Yates, P. M., Adams, J. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Universal cures for idiosyncratic illnesses: A genealogy of therapeutic reasoning in the mental health field
This article addresses the complex relationship between aetiology, diagnosis and drug treatment by examining the style of reasoning underlying prescribing practices through an historical lens. A genealogy of contemporary prescribing practices is proposed, that draws significant comparisons between 19th-century medicine and modern psychiatry. Tensions between specific, standardized cures and specific, idiosyncratic patients have been historically at play in clinical reasoning – and still are today. This inquiry into the epistemological foundations of contemporary drug prescription reveals an underlying search for scie...
Source: Health: - April 20, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Collin, J. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Being-in-dialysis: The experience of the machine-body for home dialysis users
This article contributes to the literature on the self-care of dialysis patients by examining the relevance of the concept of the machine–body and cyborg embodiment for the lived experience of people with end-stage renal failure. The article, which presents a discussion of 24 in-depth interviews undertaken between 2009 and 2012, shows that although dialysis therapy is disruptive of being and time, study participants experience home dialysis in terms of flexibility, control and independence. While they do not use the term machine–body as a descriptor, the concept resonates with felt experience. Data also indicat...
Source: Health: - April 20, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Shaw, R. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
The inherent tensions and ambiguities of hope: Towards a post-formal analysis of experiences of advanced-cancer patients
This article extends this approach through a more detailed consideration of the experience of hoping itself. Our post-formal analysis denotes the tensions that are intrinsic and defining features of lifeworlds around hope, emphasising the dissonance and fragility of hoping. Drawing upon interview and observational data involving patients with advanced-cancer diagnoses who were taking part in clinical trials, we explore three main tensions which emerged within the analysis: tensions involving time and liminality between future and present; ontological tensions involving the concrete and the possible, the ‘realistic&rs...
Source: Health: - March 16, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Brown, P., de Graaf, S., Hillen, M. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Between hope and evidence: How community advisors demarcate the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate stem cell treatments
In conclusion, we emphasize the need to re-conceptualize the boundary between science and non-science so as to allow a better appreciation of the realities of health care in the age of medical travel. (Source: Health:)
Source: Health: - March 16, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Petersen, A., Tanner, C., Munsie, M. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
The paradox of hope for working age adults recovering from stroke
This article draws on data from a Stroke Association–funded longitudinal study in South East England (2003–2006) that explored the experiences and recovery of 43 stroke survivors under 60 years. Participants were invited to take part in four interviews over an 18-month period and to complete a diary for 1 week each month during this period. Here, we chart their shifting attitudes towards the process of their recovery. We bring a focus to how this transformed their views on the possible futures before them. We underline how hope was experienced as a deeply paradoxical and risk-laden notion. With energies concent...
Source: Health: - March 16, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Alaszewski, A., Wilkinson, I. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
From hope to hope: The experience of older Chinese people with advanced cancer
In our study that explored the current end-of-life care provision for Chinese older people with advanced/terminal cancer, hope emerged as a significant aspect of coping with their condition. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with a group of older people, their family carers and health professionals, this article explores participants’ constructions of hope in terms of what they were hoping for, how their hopes helped them cope with their illness and what sociocultural resources they drew on to build and sustain these hopes. While acknowledging similarities to Western studies of hope in terminal illness, this a...
Source: Health: - March 16, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Chen, H., Komaromy, C., Valentine, C. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Ambivalent journeys of hope: Embryonic stem cell therapy in a clinic in India
Stem cell therapy in non-Western countries such as India has received a lot of attention. Apart from media reports, there are a number of social science analyses of stem cell policy, therapy, and research, their ethical implications, and impact of advertising on patients. Nevertheless, in the media reports as well as in academic studies, experiences of patients, who undertake overseas journeys for stem cell therapy, have largely been either ignored or presented reductively, often as a "false hope." In this article, I analyze the experiences of patients and their "journeys of hope" to NuTech Mediworld, an embryonic stem cel...
Source: Health: - March 16, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Prasad, A. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Metrics of hope: Disciplining affect in oncology
This article explores the emergence of a ‘regime of hope’ in the context of oncology care, practice and research. More specifically, my focus is the emergence, since the 1970s or so, of hope scales and indexes used to metricise the emotional states of cancer patients. These usually take the form of psychometric tests designed and deployed in order to subject affective life to calculative and rational scrutiny. This article locates this within the tensions of a ‘turn’ towards the emotions in critical social science literature. Scholarship has, for instance, been anxious not to deny the embodied reali...
Source: Health: - March 16, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Brown, N. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Editorial introduction: The sociology of hope in contexts of health, medicine, and healthcare
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Source: Health: - March 16, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Petersen, A., Wilkinson, I. Tags: Editorial Source Type: research
Book Review: Todd Meyers, The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy
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Source: Health: - December 18, 2014 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Thille, P. Tags: Book Reviews Source Type: research
Book Review: Kristin A Riekert, Judith K Okene and Lori Pbert (eds), The Handbook of Health Behavior Change
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Source: Health: - December 18, 2014 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Bird, E. Tags: Book Reviews Source Type: research
The effect of strategies of personal resilience on depression recovery in an Australian cohort: A mixed methods study
Strategies of personal resilience enable successful adaptation in adversity. Among patients experiencing depression symptoms, we explored which personal resilience strategies they find most helpful and tested the hypothesis that use of these strategies improves depression recovery. We used interview and survey data from the Diagnosis, Management and Outcomes of Depression in Primary Care 2005 cohort of patients experiencing depression symptoms in Victoria, Australia. A total of 564 participants answered a computer-assisted telephone interview question at 12 months follow-up, about what they found most helpful for their dep...
Source: Health: - December 18, 2014 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Griffiths, F. E., Boardman, F. K., Chondros, P., Dowrick, C. F., Densley, K., Hegarty, K. L., Gunn, J. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Impact of age at onset for children with renal failure on education and employment transitions
This study shows how unpredictable failures of renal replacement therapies, comorbidities and/or side effects of treatment in the early life course often coincided with critical moments for education and employment. Entering school, college, work-related training or employment, and disclosing health status or educational underachievement to an employer, were particularly critical, and those who were ill before puberty became progressively more disadvantaged in terms of successful transition into full-time employment, compared with those first diagnosed after puberty. (Source: Health:)
Source: Health: - December 18, 2014 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Lewis, H., Arber, S. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
