Book Review: Susan Bell, DES Daughters: Embodied Knowledge and the Transformation of Women's Health Politics in the Late Twentieth-Century
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Source: Health: - February 27, 2014 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Adam, B. E. Tags: Book Reviews Source Type: research
Book Review: Almeling R, Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm
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Source: Health: - February 27, 2014 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Kent, J. Tags: Book Reviews Source Type: research
Engineering the fitness of older patients for chemotherapy: An exploration of Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment in practice
Clinicians often report that currently available methods to assess older patients, including standard clinical consultations, do not elicit the information necessary to make an appropriate cancer treatment recommendation for older cancer patients. An increasingly popular way of assessing the potential of older patients to cope with chemotherapy is a Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment. What constitutes Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment, however, is open to interpretation and varies from one setting to another. Furthermore, Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment’s usefulness as a predictor of fitness for chemotherapy and ...
Source: Health: - February 27, 2014 Category: Global & Universal Authors: McCarthy, A. L., Cook, P. S., Yates, P. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
'DSM-V is taking away our identity': The reaction of the online community to the proposed changes in the diagnosis of Asperger's disorder
This article considers the fate of Asperger’s disorder in the light of proposals for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.) to collapse Asperger’s disorder along with other pervasive developmental disorders into a general spectrum of autism. It is argued that a powerful lay and scientific culture has evolved around the concept of Asperger’s disorder, which has found a particularly compelling voice over the last decade in the online Asperger community, with websites such as Wrong Planet recruiting tens of thousands of members. In order to assess the impact of these proposed cha...
Source: Health: - February 27, 2014 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Giles, D. C. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Time and the psychiatric interview: The negotiation of temporal criteria of the depressive disorder
In this article, I am concerned with doctors’ negotiations of the temporal dimension of the diagnostic criteria of depressive disorders during the first psychiatric interview. The data come from 16 initial psychiatric interviews recorded by doctors in three psychiatric hospitals in Poland. Taking a constructionist view of discourse and psychiatric practices, I shall argue that the discursive practice related to temporal information about patients’ illnesses serves in gaining information, which is useful in the medical model of psychiatric diagnosis. The doctors positioned the patients’ experiences on the ...
Source: Health: - February 27, 2014 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Ziolkowska, J. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
'Men give in to chips and beer too easily': How working-class men make sense of gender differences in health
This article, based on qualitative research with working-class men, explores men’s perceptions and experiences regarding gender differences in health. It demonstrates how men put forward a range of behavioural/cultural, materialist/structural and psychosocial factors, which were believed to differently impact men’s health compared to women. A common theme underpinning their explanations was the ways in which men and women were located within two distinct gender categories. These characterisations were used to explain why health-damaging beliefs and behaviours were more prevalent among men and also why men were ...
Source: Health: - February 27, 2014 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Dolan, A. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
The management of situated risk: A parental perspective on child food allergy
This article draws on a socio-cultural approach to explore parents’ understandings and management of child food allergy in the context of everyday life, as ‘situated’ risk. A focus group study was carried out with 31 parents of children diagnosed with food allergy at two children’s hospitals. The analysis of the focus group material reveals how the management of allergy risk seems to permeate most aspects of everyday life as well as how the parents draw on a dominant norm of risk avoidance as well as a counter-discourse of calculated risk taking. The patterns of risk management found in this study a...
Source: Health: - February 27, 2014 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Stjerna, M.-L., Vetander, M., Wickman, M., Olin Lauritzen, S. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Differences by degree: Fatness, contagion and pre-emption
Drawing on evidence from the Framingham Heart Study, Christakis and Fowler in their 2007 article published in the New England Journal of Medicine make the claim that obesity spreads in social networks. Whether they are correct in this assertion is neither the concern nor focus of this article. Rather, what is of interest is the subsequent mobilisation of ‘contagion’ to describe this spread and to account for the emergence of an ‘obesity epidemic’ in contemporary society. Contrary to the argument that there is less stigma attached to obesity, the reporting of the Christakis and Fowler article suggest...
Source: Health: - February 27, 2014 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Brown, T. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Becoming men: Gender, disability, and transitioning to adulthood
Children and youth with progressive conditions are living longer, and there is increased interest in designing programs that will assist them with "transitioning" to adulthood. Almost none of the transitions research to date, however, has attended to the experiences of disabled boys in "becoming men," nor has there been critical conceptual work problematizing notions of "normal" adulthood or theorizing the complex, diverse, and gendered experiences of transitioning. In this Canadian study, we investigated the intersectionality of gender, disability, and emerging adulthood with 15 young men with Duchenne muscular dystrophy....
Source: Health: - December 19, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Gibson, B. E., Mistry, B., Smith, B., Yoshida, K. K., Abbott, D., Lindsay, S., Hamdani, Y. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Revaluing donor and recipient bodies in the globalised blood economy: Transitions in public policy on blood safety in the United Kingdom
The clinical use of blood has a long history, but its apparent stability belies the complexity of contemporary practices in this field. In this article, we explore how the production, supply and deployment of blood products are socially mediated, drawing on theoretical perspectives from recent work on ‘tissue economies’. We highlight the ways in which safety threats in the form of infections that might be transmitted through blood and plasma impact on this tissue economy and how these have led to a revaluation of donor bodies and restructuring of blood economies. Specifically, we consider these themes in relati...
Source: Health: - December 19, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Busby, H., Kent, J., Farrell, A.-M. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Surviving men's depression: Women partners' perspectives
While men’s gendered experiences of depression have been described, the perspectives of women partners who are affected by men’s depression have received little attention. Women partners were recruited to explore how men’s depression impacts them and its influence on gender regimes. Individual interviews with 29 women spouses were coded and analysed. Although idealized femininity positions women as endlessly patient and caring, our findings reveal significant challenges in attempting to fulfil these gender ideals in the context of living with a male partner who is experiencing depression. The strain and d...
Source: Health: - December 19, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Bottorff, J. L., Oliffe, J. L., Kelly, M. T., Johnson, J. L., Carey, J. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
The best laid plans? Women's choices, expectations and experiences in childbirth
The past decades have seen a drastic increase in the medicalization of childbirth, evidenced by increasing Caesarean section rates in many Western countries. In a rare moment of congruence, alternative health-care providers, feminist advocates for women’s health and, most recently, mainstream medical service providers have all expressed serious concerns about the rise in Caesarean section rates and women’s roles in medicalization. These concerns stem from divergent philosophical positions as well as differing assumptions about the causes for increasing medicalization. Drawing on this debate, and using a feminis...
Source: Health: - December 19, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Malacrida, C., Boulton, T. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Sidestepping questions of legitimacy: How community representatives manoeuvre to effect change in a health service
This article examines the underlying assumption that legitimacy is the major pathway to influence for community representatives. It takes a different vantage point from previous research in its examination of data (primarily through 34 in-depth interviews, observation and recording of 26 meetings and other interactions documented in field notes) from a 3-year study of community representatives’ action in a large health region in Australia. The analysis primarily deploys Michel de Certeau’s ideas of Strategy and Tactic to understand the action and effects of the generally ‘weaker players’ in the spac...
Source: Health: - December 19, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Nathan, S., Stephenson, N., Braithwaite, J. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Young people and health: Towards a new conceptual framework for understanding empowerment
This article outlines a more dynamic and generative conceptualisation of empowerment than hitherto articulated in the literature, informed by Lukes’ multidimensional perspective of power. Drawing on findings from an ethnographic study on empowerment and young people’s health, this article develops six conceptually distinct forms of empowerment (impositional, dispositional, concessional, oppositional, normative and transformative). Data were collected from 55 young men and women aged 15–16 years through group discussions, individual interviews and observational work in a school and surrounding community se...
Source: Health: - December 19, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Spencer, G. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Bipolar disorder: Idioms of susceptibility and disease and the role of 'genes' in illness explanations
This qualitative study explores (1) how members of the Dutch Association for People with Bipolar Disorder explain the affliction of bipolar disorder; (2) the relationship between genetic, environmental and personal factors in these explanations and (3) the relationship between illness explanations, self-management and identity. A total of 40 participants took part in seven different focus group discussions. The results demonstrate that there are two different explanatory idioms, each one centred around an opposing concept, that is, susceptibility and disease. Individuals who construct explanations around the concept of &ls...
Source: Health: - October 24, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Baart, I., Widdershoven, G. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
