Nursing futility, managing medicine: Nurses perspectives on the transition from life-prolonging to palliative care
The shift from life-prolonging and palliative care can be fraught with interpersonal complexities as patients face dilemmas around mortality and the dying process. Nurses can play a central role in managing these moments, often with a focus on promoting and enhancing communication around: the meaning of palliative care, the nature of futility and the dying process more broadly. These sites of nurse–patient communication can be highly charged and pose unique challenges to nurses including how to balance nursing perspectives versus those of other stakeholders including doctors. Here, drawing on interviews with nurses, ...
Source: Health: - November 8, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Broom, A., Kirby, E., Good, P., Lwin, Z. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
New Age in Israel: Formative ethos, identity blindness, and implications for healthcare
This article presents a critical analysis of New Age culture. We draw on two empirical studies conducted in Israel and show that the lofty notions about freedom from the shackles of socially structured identities and the unifying potential this holds, as well as the claim regarding the basic equality of human beings, are utopian. Blindness toward ethno-national identity reinforces identification with a self-evident hegemonic perception, thereby leading to the exclusion of peripheral groups such as indigenous populations. This exclusion is manifested in the discourse symbolically as well as in the praxis of complementary an...
Source: Health: - November 8, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Simchai, D., Keshet, Y. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Narrative as re-fusion: Making sense and value from sickle cell and thalassaemia trait
This article takes the case of genetic carriers within racialized minority groups, namely, those with sickle cell or thalassaemia trait, and takes seriously the notion that their narratives are ethical practices. In line with the work of Paul Ricoeur, such storied practices are found to link embodiment, social relationships with significant others and wider socio-cultural and socio-political relations. At the same time, such practices are about embodying values. These narratives may be considered as practices that re-fuse what genetic counselling has de-fused, in order to make sense of a life in its entirety and to strive ...
Source: Health: - November 8, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Dyson, S. M., Ahmad, W. I., Atkin, K. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Narrative approaches in mental health: Preserving the emancipatory tradition
Narrative approaches have exercised an emancipatory influence within mental health. In this article, it is suggested that there is a risk that the emancipatory tradition associated with narrative may be co-opted through contemporary mental health strategy by a narrow agenda which promotes a particular Western and neoliberal form of citizenship. This may limit the way recovery can be imagined by equating it solely with the future-orientated individual who strives, above all, to be economically independent. To resist this, it is suggested that narrative in mental health should be approached with recourse to therapeutic think...
Source: Health: - November 8, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Fisher, P., Lees, J. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Life according to ME: Caught in the ebb-tide
In this article, we explore the role of ‘place’ in shaping people’s illness experiences through a data-led inductive case-study based on experiential data from people living with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) in Norway. Our main aim is to understand how they experience, interpret and attach meaning to various places in which they reside, and how they construct the course of a life influenced by chronic illness. The study is based on stories containing photographs and written texts, received from 10 women and men. In their stories, they describe those places where they experience their illness in the leas...
Source: Health: - November 8, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Lian, O. S., Rapport, F. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Legitimating the illegitimate: How doctors manage their knowledge of the prestige of diseases
We presented a focus group panel of doctors a table of 38 diseases rank-ordered by prestige according to the results of a previous quantitative study of doctors. We prompted a lively discussion among the doctors by asking them whether they were familiar with this rank order. In analysing how they managed the prestige knowledge presented to them, we focused on how they handled the value conflict between this informal rank order and the formal value of equality of treatment. Using positioning theory as a theoretical premise and a methodological tool, we found that the focus group participants created positions in their conve...
Source: Health: - November 8, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Haldar, M., Engebretsen, E., Album, D. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Fragmentation in Australian Commonwealth and South Australian State policy on mental health and older people: A governmentality analysis
This article describes how older people’s mental health is governed through policy discourse by examining Australian Commonwealth and South Australian State government policy documents, and commentaries from professional groups, advocacy groups and non-governmental organisations. Documents published between 2009 and 2014 were analysed using a governmentality approach, informed by Foucault. Discourses of ‘risk’, ‘ageing as decline/dependence’ and ‘healthy ageing’ were identified. Through these discourses, different neo-liberal governmental strategies are applied to ‘target&rsq...
Source: Health: - November 8, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Oster, C., Henderson, J., Lawn, S., Reed, R., Dawson, S., Muir-Cochrane, E., Fuller, J. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
In the loop: Practices of self-monitoring from accounts by trial participants
This article addresses this by exploring how participants in a particular trial (‘Get Moving’) experienced the process and nature of feedback. Although the trial aimed to compare the potential efficacy of three different monitoring activities designed to encourage greater physical activity, participants did not present distinctly different accounts of each intervention and the specifics of the feedback provided. Instead, their accounts took the form of much more extended and personal narratives that included other people and features of the environment. We draw on these broader descriptions to problematise the ...
Source: Health: - August 30, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Lynch, R., Cohn, S. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Hope and doubt in the promise of neuroimaging: The case of autism spectrum disorder
This study highlights issues surrounding the perceived biopsychiatric focus of neuroimaging technologies within clinical practice, concerns regarding misdirected research attention, and the ways in which understandings of future utility mediate perceptions of technological utility. (Source: Health:)
Source: Health: - August 30, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Bertorelli, T. E. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Healthism in Denmark: State, market, and the search for a "Moral Compass"
This article focuses on contemporary responses to public health messages in Denmark, a country whose system of social welfare is, like that of the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe, undergoing increasing levels of marketization and privatization. Drawing primarily upon Robert Crawford’s analysis of healthism as a neoliberal project, the aim of this article is to develop critical understandings of how individuals respond both bodily and emotionally to ideologies of health and the body in the context of a changing marketplace for the consumption of health and its messages. This article will analyze perceptions and ...
Source: Health: - August 30, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Kristensen, D. B., Lim, M., Askegaard, S. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
All care, but whose responsibility? Community juries reason about expert and patient responsibilities in prostate-specific antigen screening for prostate cancer
General practitioners have implicitly been given responsibility for guiding men’s decisions about prostate-specific antigen–based screening for prostate cancer, but patients’ expectations of the bounds of this responsibility remain unclear. We sought to explore how well-informed members of the public allocate responsibilities in prostate-specific antigen screening decision-making. In 2014, we convened two Community juries in Sydney, Australia, to address questions related to the content and timing of information provision and respective roles of patients and general practitioners in screening decisions. P...
Source: Health: - August 30, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Degeling, C., Carter, S. M., Rychetnik, L. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Complementary and alternative medicines occupational closure in Portuguese healthcare: Contradictions and challenges
This article analyses strategies of closure recently enacted by complementary and alternative medicine practitioners in order to achieve occupational control over work domains in healthcare, taking Portugal as an example. A combination of the neo-Weberian occupational closure theory of the professions and Abbott’s jurisdictional vacancy theory is proposed as the framework for analysis. Acupuncture and homeopathy will be presented as case studies. Data are derived from in-depth interviews with 10 traditional acupuncturists and 10 traditional homeopaths. Data analysis suggests that (1) professionalisation, (2) alignmen...
Source: Health: - August 30, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Almeida, J. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
The aspiration for holism in the medical humanities: Some historical and philosophical sources of reflection
This article historicises the potential for holism, a current aspiration within the medical humanities. This contemporary debate in the research community reflects philosophical positions about idealism and realism, with their traceable historical roots. This article summarises those roots and draws attention to their current relevance for health researchers. Starting with the recognition within the medical humanities that biomedical reductionism now attracts criticism, it moves to exploring the history of ideas in philosophy, the arts and science about holism and the challenge of researching health and illness within the ...
Source: Health: - June 29, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Pilgrim, D. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Temporary sobriety initiatives as public pedagogy: Windows of opportunity for embodied learning
This article presents findings from a series of in-depth, post-campaign interviews with FebFast 2014 participants and staff about how these campaigns can be understood as a form of public pedagogy or non-traditional learning that purposefully cultivates and suggests health-promoting meanings for embodied experience. It explicates the mechanisms of public pedagogies that rely on embodiment and, importantly, considers the learner’s perspective on the pedagogical process. Temporary sobriety initiatives are found to operate thanks to (1) a structure that prescribes and facilitates short-term changes and enforces complian...
Source: Health: - June 29, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Robert, J. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
ILLNESS IS WORK: Revisiting the concept of illness careers and recognizing the identity work of patients with ME/CFS
The concept of careers has an extensive history in the sociology of health and illness. Among other things, the notion of a career has been used to describe the changing identities of patients diagnosed with mental illness, to identify distinct stages in the progression of various illnesses, and to recognize the cooperative efforts of hospitalized patients. However, the career concept may be reanalyzed as part of an analytical metaphor that makes salient both the agency of people with illnesses and the social structures in which they are enmeshed. This metaphor, ILLNESS IS WORK, can valorize and aid understanding of the id...
Source: Health: - June 29, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Grue, J. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
