Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2024-05-18Epub Date: 2024-05-07DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2024.2349514
Imogen Bevan, Linda Bauld, Alice Street
{"title":"Who We Test For: Aligning Relational and Public Health Responsibilities in COVID-19 Testing in Scotland.","authors":"Imogen Bevan, Linda Bauld, Alice Street","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2349514","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2349514","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>COVID-19 testing programs in the UK often called on people to test to \"protect others.\" In this article we explore motivations to test and the relationships to \"others\" involved in an asymptomatic testing program at a Scottish university. We show that participants engaged with testing as a relational technology, through which they navigated multiple overlapping responsibilities to kin, colleagues, flatmates, strangers, and to more diffuse publics. We argue that the success of testing as a technique of governance depends not only on the production of disciplined selves, but also on the program's capacity to align interpersonal and public scales of responsibility.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"277-294"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11104742/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140877651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2024-05-18Epub Date: 2024-05-16DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2024.2349515
Alexandra Brandt Ryborg Jønsson
{"title":"Medicalization of Old Age: Experiencing Healthism and Overdiagnosis in a Nordic Welfare State.","authors":"Alexandra Brandt Ryborg Jønsson","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2349515","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2349515","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In Denmark, people are expected to take responsibility for their health, not least as their bodies age and they experience signs of physical or mental decline. Drawing on fieldwork among older Danes, I illustrate that an excessive focus on health gives rise to social and structural controversies and disparities, linking ideas of healthy behavior at the individual level with the societal framing of disease and aging. I argue that this emphasis contributes to the unwarranted diagnosis of bodily variations that naturally occur in the aging process, a phenomenon referred to as overdiagnosis, adding to a broader medicalization of old age.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":"43 4","pages":"310-323"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140960252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2024-05-18Epub Date: 2024-05-16DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2024.2349512
Jonas Strandholdt Bach, Bagga Bjerge, Natasja Eilerskov, Camilla Hoffmann Merrild
{"title":"As Long As it Lasts-Older Substance Users, Brittle Ties and Danish Health Care.","authors":"Jonas Strandholdt Bach, Bagga Bjerge, Natasja Eilerskov, Camilla Hoffmann Merrild","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2349512","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2349512","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this article, we examine a group of older marginalized substance-using citizens and their relations to Danish health care. We offer empirical examples collected through ethnographic fieldwork, about how they handle their health situation and encounters with the Danish healthcare system. Analytically, we particularly draw on the concept of disposable ties, and suggest the term \"brittle ties\" to nuance the term and examine how perceived individual autonomy is weighted against health care trajectories and how these citizens often prefer to fend for themselves or lean on provisional networks rather than enter into health care trajectories and follow-up treatment.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":"43 4","pages":"324-337"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140960250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2024-04-02Epub Date: 2024-01-11DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2023.2301388
Laura Caballe-Climent
{"title":"\"Beautiful Registrations\": Metrics and Prenatal Care in Rural Bahia, Brazil.","authors":"Laura Caballe-Climent","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2023.2301388","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2023.2301388","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In Brazil, lack of quality in the delivery of prenatal care is a persistent concern. In this study, I analyze the dynamics taking place in the prenatal clinical encounter, and illuminate how the requirement to produce metrics through registration and monitoring endorses a form of bureaucratic care. This form of care develops in a context characterized by scarcity and a lack of medical resources, where healthcare professionals attempt to contain uncertainty. Ruled by notions of risk, centered in measuring practices, and saturated by an overvaluation of technology, bureaucratic care reinforces the disenfranchizement and stigmatization of Black rural women.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"233-246"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139418369","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2024-04-02Epub Date: 2024-03-04DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2024.2322435
James Wintrup
{"title":"Relational Harm: On the Divisive Effects of Global Health Volunteering at a Hospital in Rural Zambia.","authors":"James Wintrup","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2322435","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2322435","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Drawing on ethnographic research at a hospital in rural Zambia, I show how the presence of white Christian medical volunteers from the United States damaged relations between local health workers and patients. Working from a position of economic and racial privilege, medical volunteers received praise from many patients and residents. However, these positive attitudes incited resentment among many Zambian health workers who felt that their own efforts and expertise were being undervalued or ignored. Focusing on these disrupted relationships, I argue that it is crucial to understand how global health volunteering can produce enduring forms of \"relational harm\".</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"189-204"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140022976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2024-04-02Epub Date: 2024-02-08DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2024.2310857
Christina Gerdien Roelofke Muusse, Cornelis L Mulder, Hans Kroon, Jeannette Pols
{"title":"Uncertainty Work: Dealing with a Psychiatric Crisis in Two European Community Mental Health Teams.","authors":"Christina Gerdien Roelofke Muusse, Cornelis L Mulder, Hans Kroon, Jeannette Pols","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2310857","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2310857","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The quest for how to deal with a crisis in a community setting, with the aim of deinstitutionalizing mental health care, and reducing hospitalization and coercion, is important. In this article, we argue that to understand how this can be done, we need to shift the attention from acute moments to daily uncertainty work conducted in community mental health teams. By drawing on an empirical ethics approach, we contrast the modes of caring of two teams in Utrecht and Trieste. Our analysis shows how temporality structures, such as watchful waiting, are important in dealing with the uncertainty of a crisis.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"247-261"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139703759","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2024-04-02Epub Date: 2024-03-06DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2024.2324890
Gabriel Abarca-Brown
{"title":"Becoming a (Neuro)migrant: Haitian Migration, Translation and Subjectivation in Santiago, Chile.","authors":"Gabriel Abarca-Brown","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2324890","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2324890","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Based on a multi-sited ethnography conducted over 14 months in northern Santiago, I examine how the introduction of a series of health policies and the global mental health agenda has interacted with and impacted Haitian migrants in the context of a postdictatorship neoliberal Chile (1990-2019). Specifically, I explore the interactions between health and social institutions, mental health practitioners, psy technologies, and Haitian migrants, highlighting migrants' subjectivation processes and everyday life. I argue that Haitian migrants engage with heterogeneous subjectivation processes in their interactions with health and social institutions, challenging normative values of integration into Chilean society. These processes are marked not only by the presence of, or exposure to, psy interventions and mental health discourses but also by the degree of compatibility between a psychiatric and neurological language and Haitians' ideals and moral frameworks.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"262-276"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11090156/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140040611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2024-04-02Epub Date: 2024-03-07DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2024.2324891
Sibille Merz, Franziska König, Joshua Paul, Andreas Bergholz, Christine Holmberg
{"title":"Crafting Ethnographic Relationships During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Germany Using Voice-Based Technologies.","authors":"Sibille Merz, Franziska König, Joshua Paul, Andreas Bergholz, Christine Holmberg","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2324891","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2324891","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Drawing on a two-year ethnography of care practices during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, we discuss the affordances of voice-based technologies (smartphones, basic mobile phones, and landline telephones) in collecting ethnographic data and crafting relationships with participants. We illustrate how such technologies allowed us to move with participants, eased data collection through the social expectations around their use, and reoriented our attention to the multiple qualities of sound. Adapting research on the performativity of technology, we argue that voice-based technologies integrated us into participants' everyday lives while also maintaining physical distance in times of infectious sociality.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"219-232"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140050686","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2024-04-02Epub Date: 2024-03-28DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2024.2325606
Rebecca Irons
{"title":"Challenging NHS Corporate Mentality: Hospital-Management and Bureaucracy in London's Pandemic.","authors":"Rebecca Irons","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2325606","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2325606","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Whilst NHS Health Service management is usually characterized by hierarchized bureaucracy and profit-driven competitiveness, the COVID-19 pandemic drastically disrupted these ways of working and allowed London-based non-clinical management to experience their roles otherwise. This paper is based on 35 interviews with senior non-clinical management at a London-based NHS Trust during 'Alpha phase' of Britain's pandemic response (May-August 2020), an oft-overlooked group in the literature. I will draw upon Graeber's theory of \"total bureaucratization\" to argue that though the increasing neo-liberalization of the health-services has hitherto contributed toward a corporate mentality, the pandemic gave managers a chance to experience more collaboration and freedom than usual, which ultimately led to more effective realization of decision-making and change. The pandemic has shown NHS managers that there are alternatives to neoliberal logics of competition and hierarchy, and that those alternatives actually result in happier and effectively, more capable staff.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":"43 3","pages":"205-218"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140307357","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2024-02-17Epub Date: 2024-03-06DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2024.2324887
Márcio Vilar
{"title":"Tackling the Unknown: Medical Semiotics of Inflammation and their Legal-Epistemological Boundaries in Brazil.","authors":"Márcio Vilar","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2324887","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2324887","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Do different medico-scientific understandings of autoimmune inflammation, whose carriers disobediently promote the therapeutic use of immunostimulants, have the potential to destabilize the hegemony of the standard palliative treatment based on immunosuppression? Here I explore whether and how medical paradigms in Brazil develop and expand around immunopathologies through practices of exclusion and inclusion in the context of global circulation of knowledges, therapies, and regulatory frameworks. While focusing on concurrent immunotherapeutic models <i>within</i> biomedicine, I discuss aspects of legal-epistemological frictions that animate controversies in which distinct ways of co-producing medical evidence affect and are affected by the biomedical establishment.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"130-145"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140050687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}