Talking about sex in the Gender Identity Clinic: Implications for training and practice
This article provides the first systematic examination of the ways ‘talk about sex’ is occasioned and managed by doctors and patients in real-life interactions in a National Health Service Gender Identity Clinic. Drawing on a corpus of 194 recordings of psychiatric assessment sessions, the article examines how parties initiate and develop talk about sex, and which strategies appear to work best for doctor–patient alignment. The analyses revealed that the most aligning methods were for clinicians to make transitions from asking questions about relationships in general to talk about sex, or to build opportu...
Source: Health: - October 24, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Speer, S. A. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Dual embedded agency: Physicians implement integrative medicine in health-care organizations
This article proposes that dual embedded agency may provide an explanation of the paradox. The article draws from an ethnographic study that examined the ways in which dual-trained physicians, namely medical doctors trained also in some modality of complementary and alternative medicine, integrate complementary and alternative medicine into the biomedical fortress of mainstream health-care organizations. Participant observations were conducted during the years 2006–2011. The observed physicians were found to be embedded in two diverse medical cultures and to have a hybrid professional identity that comprised two sets...
Source: Health: - October 24, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Keshet, Y. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder blame game: A study on the positioning of professionals, teachers and parents
Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder is currently the most debated childhood psychiatric diagnosis. Given the circulation of competing perspectives about the ‘real’ causes of children’s behaviour and the ‘best’ way to treat them, we aim to analyse the interactions of the central social actors’ discourses about attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder children within the Italian context. Adopting a multi-method approach, we focus on the polyphonic chorus of voices surrounding the child, studying the discourses of mental health professionals, teachers and parents. These actors are repr...
Source: Health: - October 24, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Frigerio, A., Montali, L., Fine, M. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Finding the patient in patient safety
This article extends the field by highlighting the activity of patients and their carers in determining the safety of these systems. We draw on data from three studies exploring patients’ accounts of their health-care experiences in Australia and internationally, to show how patients and carers are currently contributing to the safety of their own care. Furthermore, we emphasise the importance of patient–clinician collaboration in ensuring the success of these activities. We argue that it is no longer sufficient to discuss if patients should be involved with ensuring their own safety. Given that patients are al...
Source: Health: - October 24, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Hor, S.-y., Godbold, N., Collier, A., Iedema, R. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Producing children in the 21st century: A critical discourse analysis of the science and techniques of monitoring early child development
This article uses a critical discursive approach, supported by Haraway’s ideas of technoscience, to analyse a population-based early child development research initiative. This initiative organises a large-scale surveillance of children’s development, operating from the premise that risks to development are best captured early to optimise children’s potential. The analysis in this article shows an intermingling of health and economic discourses and clarifies how the child is a figure of significant contemporary social and political interests. In a poignant example of technobiopolitics, the collusion betwe...
Source: Health: - October 24, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Einboden, R., Rudge, T., Varcoe, C. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Complementary and alternative medicines, embodied subjectivity and experiences of healing
This article is premised on a phenomenological understanding of embodied subjectivity as paving way for more nuanced understanding into experiences of healing. As such, this article contends that ill health transcends the biomedical body. Healing experiences are also entwined with the values and ideals that are normalized in the complementary health sphere. Discourses of health and wellness thus also play a role in the generation of healing experiences. I draw on qualitative research with clients and practitioners involved in complementary and alternative medicines in England. I will first introduce phenomenological ideals...
Source: Health: - August 28, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Sointu, E. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Understanding support for complementary and alternative medicine in general populations: Use and perceived efficacy
Proponents of complementary and alternative medicine argue that these treatments can be used with great effect in addition to, and sometimes instead of, conventional medicine, a position which has drawn sustained opposition from those who advocate an evidence-based approach to the evaluation of treatment efficacy. Using recent survey data from the United Kingdom, this article seeks to establish a clearer understanding of the nature of the public’s relationship with complementary and alternative medicine within the general population by focusing on beliefs about the perceived effectiveness of homeopathy, in addition t...
Source: Health: - August 28, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Stoneman, P., Sturgis, P., Allum, N. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Creativity and health: An anti-humanist reflection
This article explores both creativity and health from an anti-humanist perspective and develops a Deleuze-inspired analysis to supply the theoretical framework for creativity and health. In this view, creativity is an active, experimenting flow within a network or assemblage of bodies, things, ideas and institutions, while health is understood as the capacity of a body to affect and be affected by this assemblage. It is consequently unsurprising that there is a relationship between creative activity and health. This analysis is used to explore how creative production and reception can affect health, and to assess the impli...
Source: Health: - August 28, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Fox, N. J. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Interrogating discourse: The application of Foucault's methodological discussion to specific inquiry
This article takes the position that methodological design should be informed by ongoing discussion and applied as appropriate to a particular area of inquiry. The discussion given offers an interpretation and application of Foucault’s methodological principles, integrating a reading of Foucault with applications of his work by other authors, showing how this is then applied to interrogate the practice of vocational rehabilitation. It is intended as a contribution to methodological discussion in this area, offering an interpretation of various methodological elements described by Foucault, alongside specific applicat...
Source: Health: - August 28, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Fadyl, J. K., Nicholls, D. A., McPherson, K. M. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Understanding context for quality improvement: Artefacts, affordances and socio-material infrastructure
This article explores a dimension of context not typically taken into account in the health-care improvement literature: the infrastructural context. Many quality improvement interventions hinge on the introduction of artefacts to support behavioural change in the workplace. Despite calls from scholars of technology in practice for a greater acknowledgement of the role of such mundane artefacts in supporting the organisation of health-care work, they are rarely considered in these terms in evaluations of improvement efforts. In this article, I argue that understanding the potential generative effects of artefacts for quali...
Source: Health: - August 28, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Allen, D. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Heteronormativity hurts everyone: Experiences of young men and clinicians with sexually transmitted infection/HIV testing in British Columbia, Canada
Heteronormative assumptions can negatively influence the lives of young gay and bisexual men, and recent sociological analyses have identified the negative impacts of heteronormativity on heterosexual men (e.g. ‘fag discourse’ targeted at heterosexual adolescents). However, insights into how heteronormative discourses may be (re)produced in clinical settings and how they contribute to health outcomes for gay, bisexual and heterosexual men are poorly understood. This analysis draws on in-depth interviews with 45 men (15–25 years old) and 25 clinicians in British Columbia, Canada, to examine how heteronorma...
Source: Health: - August 28, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Knight, R., Shoveller, J. A., Oliffe, J. L., Gilbert, M., Goldenberg, S. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
'Catching up': The significance of occupational communities for the delivery of high quality home care by community nurses
This article examines the importance of some informal work practices among community nurses during a period of significant organizational change. Ethnographic fieldwork in two purposively selected adult community nursing services in England comprised 79 hours of observation of routine practice, 21 interviews with staff and 23 interviews with patients. We identified the informal work practice of ‘catching up’, informal work conversations between immediate colleagues, as an important but often invisible aspect of satisfying work relationships and of the relational care of patients. Drawing on anthropological lite...
Source: Health: - June 17, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Adams, M., Robert, G., Maben, J. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Ills from the womb? A critical examination of clinical guidelines for obesity in pregnancy
In this article, we critically examine the clinical guidelines for obesity in pregnancy put forth by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada (SOGC) that are underpinned by the rules of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM), a system of ranking knowledge that promises to provide unbiased evidence about the effectiveness of treatments. While the SOGC guidelines are intended to direct health practitioners on ‘best practice’ as they address pregnancy weight gain with clients in the clinical context, we question their usefulness, arguing that despite their commitment to objectivity, they remain mired in cu...
Source: Health: - June 17, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Jette, S., Rail, G. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Translating biomedical science into clinical practice: Molecular diagnostics and the determination of malignancy
The identification of new biomarkers that help understand the epidemiological basis of patterns of malignancy at a population level is reshaping conceptions of health, disease and normality. These developments create new challenges for clinicians and the ways in which they work with scientists and engage with patients. Bioclinical collectives, an assemblage of laboratory and clinical evidence and practice, comprise different expert groups of scientists and clinicians who typically enact their expertise through boundary work to establish some degree of jurisdictional authority over their practice. Serra (2010) has argued fo...
Source: Health: - June 17, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Cox, H., Webster, A. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Factish relations: Affective bodies in diabetes treatment
This article argues that people are always active in shaping their agency and the agency of numerous others, and that we need to attend to these processes of configuration in order to better understand and conceptualize the problem of chronic disease management. This article analyses the daily practices of people with Type 2 Diabetes, with the use of what is described as the ‘sociology of attachment’ in the field of science and technology studies. The implications of seeing and analysing chronic conditions in this manner are that determinist understandings of chronic conditions are challenged. Accordingly, an e...
Source: Health: - June 17, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Danholt, P. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
