Download or read book Ordinary Medicine Extraordinary Treatments Longer Lives and Where to Draw the Line written by and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ordinary Medicine written by Sharon R. Kaufman and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-29 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of us want and expect medicine’s miracles to extend our lives. In today’s aging society, however, the line between life-giving therapies and too much treatment is hard to see—it’s being obscured by a perfect storm created by the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries, along with insurance companies. In Ordinary Medicine Sharon R. Kaufman investigates what drives that storm’s “more is better” approach to medicine: a nearly invisible chain of social, economic, and bureaucratic forces that has made once-extraordinary treatments seem ordinary, necessary, and desirable. Since 2002 Kaufman has listened to hundreds of older patients, their physicians and family members express their hopes, fears, and reasoning as they faced the line between enough and too much intervention. Their stories anchor Ordinary Medicine. Today’s medicine, Kaufman contends, shapes nearly every American’s experience of growing older, and ultimately medicine is undermining its own ability to function as a social good. Kaufman’s careful mapping of the sources of our health care dilemmas should make it far easier to rethink and renew medicine’s goals.
Download or read book Good Quality written by Ayo Wahlberg and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one to two million azoospermic men--those who are unable to produce their own sperm--the demand remains insatiable. China’s twenty-two sperm banks cannot keep up, spurring sperm bank directors to publicly lament chronic shortages and even warn of a national ‘sperm crisis’ (jingzi weiji). Good Quality explores the issues behind the crisis, including declining sperm quality in the country due to environmental pollution, as well as a chronic national shortage of donors. In doing so, Wahlberg outlines the specific style of Chinese sperm banking that has emerged, shaped by the particular cultural, juridical, economic and social configurations that make up China’s restrictive reproductive complex. Good Quality shows how this high-throughput style shapes the ways in which men experience donation and how sperm is made available to couples who can afford it.
Download or read book Reinventing the Good Life written by Jeannette Pols and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2023-12-04 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since Adam Smith’s musings on ‘the invisible hand’ became more famous than his work on moral sentiments, social theorists have paid less attention to everyday ethics and aesthetics. Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand posits that social outcomes emerge by dint of the behaviours of individuals rather than their intentions or virtues. Modernist and scientific approaches to determining the common good or good forms of governance have increasingly relied on techniques of generalisation and rationalisation. This shift has meant that we no longer comprehend why and how people display a deep concern for everyday life values in their social practices. People continue to enact these values and live by them while academics lack the vocabulary and methods to grasp them. By reconstructing the history of ideas about everyday-life values, and by analysing the role of such values in contemporary care practices for patients with chronic disease in the Netherlands, Reinventing the Good Life explores new ways to study the values of everyday life, particularly in situations where the achievement of a clear cut or uniform good is unlikely. The book presents a practice-based epistemology and methodology for studying everyday care practices and supporting their goodness. This analytical approach ultimately aims to generate ideas that will allow us to relate in more
Download or read book Bioethics written by Megan-Jane Johnstone and published by Elsevier Health Sciences. This book was released on 2019-05-31 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by Australia's foremost nursing ethics scholar, Bioethics: A Nursing Perspective comprehensibly addresses the ethical challenges, obligations and responsibilities nurses will encounter in practice. With a strong emphasis on the principles and standards of human rights and social justice, the 7th edition examines the spectrum of bioethical issues in health care with a focus on patients' rights, cross-cultural ethics, vulnerability ethics, mental health ethics, professional conduct, patient safety and end-of-life ethics. - Coverage of the moral terrain of everyday practice, including: - Codes of Ethics and Codes of Conduct - End-of-life care, directives and legislation - Moral disengagement - Prejudice, discrimination and vulnerable populations - Elder abuse and child abuse - Future nursing ethics challenges - Case scenarios and critical questions to encourage reflection on key issues in practice Additional resources on Evolve eBook on VitalSource
Download or read book Situational Analysis written by Adele E. Clarke and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2017-07-20 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Second Edition offers an innovative extension of grounded theory useful in qualitative research projects that draws on interviews, observations, and visual, narrative, and historical discourse materials. To engage the dense complexities of real world situations, Situational Analysis (SA) braids together Strauss's ecological social worlds/arenas theory, Foucault's discourse analysis, and Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomes and assemblages. The book will serve as an invaluable resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate-level students, as well as professional researchers and consultants from diverse backgrounds pursuing qualitative projects.
Download or read book Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession written by Sarah Lamb and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-22 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, the North American public has pursued an inspirational vision of successful aging—striving through medical technique and individual effort to eradicate the declines, vulnerabilities, and dependencies previously commonly associated with old age. On the face of it, this bold new vision of successful, healthy, and active aging is highly appealing. But it also rests on a deep cultural discomfort with aging and being old. The contributors to Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession explore how the successful aging movement is playing out across five continents. Their chapters investigate a variety of people, including Catholic nuns in the United States; Hindu ashram dwellers; older American women seeking plastic surgery; aging African-American lesbians and gay men in the District of Columbia; Chicago home health care workers and their aging clients; Mexican men foregoing Viagra; dementia and Alzheimer sufferers in the United States and Brazil; and aging policies in Denmark, Poland, India, China, Japan, and Uganda. This book offers a fresh look at a major cultural and public health movement of our time, questioning what has become for many a taken-for-granted goal—aging in a way that almost denies aging itself.
Download or read book Cancer Intersections written by Camilo Sanz and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Cancer Intersections is an ethnographic analysis of the complex and paradoxical efforts to access neoliberal, market-based oncological treatments in Colombia, a country where all patients are legally guaranteed access to medical services, including high-cost ones. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the city of Cali, Camilo Sanz explores the deep entanglements between medical, legal, and policy practices that share a common goal of treating and curing cancer but are hindered by bureaucratic procedures, pernicious financial interests, and class politics. Cancer Intersections shows how the interplay of these hurdles dictates the rhythm at which patients access treatment and how even in resource-rich settings, patients suffer because of market imperatives that shape how cancer treatments unfold. Through careful and measured observation, Sanz unveils how a neoliberal universal health care regime delays access to care for those reliant on public assistance, which means that some patients will start expensive treatments only after it is unlikely to change the course of the disease.
Download or read book Resilient Cyborgs written by Nelly Oudshoorn and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how pacemakers and defibrillators participate in transforming life and death in high-tech societies. In both popular and medical accounts, these internal devices are often portrayed as almost magical technologies. Once implanted in bodies, they do not require any ‘user’ agency. In this unique and timely book, Nelly Oudshoorn argues that any discourse or policy assuming a passive role for people living with these implants silences the fact that keeping cyborg bodies alive involves their active engagement. Pacemakers and defibrillators not only act as potentially life-saving technologies, but simultaneously transform the fragility of bodies by introducing new vulnerabilities. Oudshoorn offers a fascinating examination of what it takes to become a resilient cyborg, and in the process develops a valuable new sociology of creating ‘resilient’ cyborgs.
Download or read book Elderhood written by Louise Aronson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-06-11 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction A New York Times Bestseller Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Winner of the WSU AOS Bonner Book Award Winner of the 2022 At Home With Growing Older Impact Award As revelatory as Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, physician and award-winning author Louise Aronson's Elderhood is an essential, empathetic look at a vital but often disparaged stage of life. For more than 5,000 years, "old" has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans are living longer than ever before, we've made old age into a disease, a condition to be dreaded, denigrated, neglected, and denied. Reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, noted Harvard-trained geriatrician Louise Aronson uses stories from her quarter century of caring for patients, and draws from history, science, literature, popular culture, and her own life to weave a vision of old age that's neither nightmare nor utopian fantasy--a vision full of joy, wonder, frustration, outrage, and hope about aging, medicine, and humanity itself. Elderhood is for anyone who is, in the author's own words, "an aging, i.e., still-breathing human being."
Download or read book Food Allergy Advocacy written by Danya Glabau and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed exploration of parents’ fight for a safe environment for their kids, interrogating how race, class, and gender shape health advocacy The success of food allergy activism in highlighting the dangers of foodborne allergens shows how illness communities can effectively advocate for the needs of their members. In Food Allergy Advocacy, Danya Glabau follows parents and activists as they fight for allergen-free environments, accurate labeling, the fair application of disability law, and access to life-saving medications for food-allergic children in the United States. At the same time, she shows how this activism also reproduces the culturally dominant politics of personhood and responsibility, based on an idealized version of the American family, centered around white, middle-class, and heteronormative motherhood. By holding up the threat of food allergens to the white nuclear family to galvanize political and scientific action, Glabau shows, the movement excludes many, including Black women and disabled adults, whose families and health have too often been marginalized from public health and social safety net programs. Further, its strategies are founded on the assumption that market-based solutions will address issues of social exclusion and equal access to healthcare. Sharing the personal experiences of a wide spectrum of people, including parents, support group leaders, physicians, entrepreneurs, and scientists, Food Allergy Advocacy raises important questions about who controls illness activism. Using critical, intersectional feminism to interrogate how race, class, and gender shape activist priorities and platforms, it shows the way to new, justice-focused models of advocacy.
Download or read book Imperfect Pregnancies written by Ilana Löwy and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-12 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction : scrutinized fetuses -- Born imperfect : birth defects before prenatal diagnosis -- Karyotypes -- Human malformations -- From prenatal diagnosis to prenatal screening -- Sex chromosome aneuploidies -- PND and new genomics approaches -- Conclusion : PND's slippery slopes, imagined and real
Download or read book Animal Ethos written by Lesley A. Sharp and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What kinds of moral challenges arise from encounters between species in laboratory science? Animal Ethos draws on ethnographic engagement with academic labs in which experimental research involving nonhuman species provokes difficult questions involving life and death, scientific progress, and other competing quandaries. Whereas much has been written on core bioethical values that inform regulated behavior in labs, Lesley A. Sharp reveals the importance of attending to lab personnel’s quotidian and unscripted responses to animals. Animal Ethos exposes the rich—yet poorly understood—moral dimensions of daily lab life, where serendipitous, creative, and unorthodox responses are evidence of concerted efforts by researchers, animal technicians, veterinarians, and animal activists to transform animal laboratories into moral scientific worlds.
Download or read book Biolust Brain Death and the Battle Over Organ Transplants written by William R. LaFleur and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-11-03 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William LaFleur (1936-2010), an eminent scholar of Japanese studies, left behind a substantial number of influential publications, as well as several unpublished works. The most significant of these examines debates concerning the practice of organ transplantation in Japan and the United States, and is published here for the first time. This provocative book challenges the North American medical and bioethical consensus that considers the transplantation of organs from brain dead donors as an unalloyed good. It joins a growing chorus of voices that question the assumption that brain death can be equated facilely with death. It provides a deep investigation of debates in Japan, introducing numerous Japanese bioethicists whose work has never been treated in English. It also provides a history of similar debates in the United States, problematizing the commonly held view that the American public was quick and eager to accept the redefinition of death. A work of intellectual and social history, this book also directly engages with questions that grow ever more relevant as the technologies we develop to extend life continue to advance. While the benefits of these technologies are obvious, their costs are often more difficult to articulate. Calling attention to the risks associated with our current biotech trajectory, LaFleur stakes out a highly original position that does not fall neatly onto either side of contemporary US ideological divides.
Download or read book Data Paradoxes written by Klaus Hoeyer and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-04-18 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why healthcare cannot—and should not—become data-driven, despite the many promises of intensified data sourcing. In contemporary healthcare, everybody seems to want more data, of higher quality, on more people, and to use this data for a wider range of purposes. In theory, such pervasive data collection should lead to a healthcare system in which data can quickly, efficiently, and unambiguously be interpreted and provide better care for patients, more efficient administration, enhanced options for research, and accelerated economic growth. In practice, however, data are difficult to interpret and the many purposes often undermine one another. In this book, anthropologist and STS scholar Klaus Hoeyer offers an in-depth look at the paradoxes surrounding healthcare data. Focusing on Denmark, a world leader in healthcare data infrastructures, Hoeyer shares the perspectives of different stakeholders, from epidemiologists to hospital managers, from patients to physicians, analyzing the social dynamics set in motion by data intensification and calling special attention to that which cannot be easily coded in a database. HHe illustrates how data can be at once helpful, overwhelming, and sometimes disastrous through concrete examples. The COVID-19 pandemic serves as a special closing case study that shows how these data paradoxes carry weighty political implications. By revealing the diverse and sometimes contradictory practices spawned by intensified data sourcing, Data Paradoxes raises vital questions about how we might better use healthcare data.
Download or read book An Anthropology of Biomedicine written by Margaret M. Lock and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 687 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fully revised and updated second edition of An Anthropology of Biomedicine, authors Lock and Nguyen introduce biomedicine from an anthropological perspective, exploring the entanglement of material bodies with history, environment, culture, and politics. Drawing on historical and ethnographic work, the book critiques the assumption made by the biological sciences of a universal human body that can be uniformly standardized. It focuses on the ways in which the application of biomedical technologies brings about radical changes to societies at large based on socioeconomic inequalities and ethical disputes, and develops and integrates the theory that the human body in health and illness is not an ontological given but a moveable, malleable entity. This second edition includes new chapters on: microbiology and the microbiome; global health; and, the self as a socio-technical system. In addition, all chapters have been comprehensively revised to take account of developments from within this fast-paced field, in the intervening years between publications. References and figures have also been updated throughout. This highly-regarded and award-winning textbook (Winner of the 2010 Prose Award for Archaeology and Anthropology) retains the character and features of the previous edition. Its coverage remains broad, including discussion of: biomedical technologies in practice; anthropologies of medicine; biology and human experiments; infertility and assisted reproduction; genomics, epigenomics, and uncertain futures; and molecularizing racial difference, ensuring it remains the essential text for students of anthropology, medical anthropology as well as public and global health.
Download or read book Late Life Homelessness written by Amanda Grenier and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-01-15 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the world and across a range of contexts, homelessness among older people is on the rise. In spite of growing media attention and new academic research on the issue, older people often remain unrecognized as a subpopulation in public policy, programs, and homeless strategies. As such, they occupy a paradoxical position of being hypervisible while remaining overlooked. Late-Life Homelessness is the first Canadian book to address this often neglected issue. Basing her analysis on a four-year ethnographic study of late-life homelessness in Montreal, Canada, Amanda Grenier uses a critical gerontological perspective to explore life at the intersection of aging and homelessness. She draws attention to disadvantage over time and how the condition of being unhoused disrupts a person’s ability to age in place, resulting in experiences of unequal aging. Weaving together findings from policy documents, stakeholder insights, and observations and interviews with older people, this book demonstrates how structures, organizational practices, and relationships related to homelessness and aging come to shape late life. Situated in the context of an aging population, rising inequality, and declining social commitments, Late-Life Homelessness stresses the moral imperative of responding justly to the needs of older people as a means of mitigating the unequal aging of unhoused elders.
