Sociology of health & illness
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The ethical issues neuroscience raises are subject to increasing attention, exemplified in the emergence of the discipline neuroethics. While the moral implications of neurotechnological developments are often discussed, less is known about how ethics intersects with everyday work in neuroscience and how scientists themselves perceive the ethics of their research. ⋯ The findings shed light on how ethical positions produce and are, in turn, produced by scientific practice. Informing sociological understandings of neuroscience, they also throw the category of neuroscience and its ethical specificity into question, given that members of this group did not experience their work as raising issues that were distinctly neuro-ethical.
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Because of the inherent complexity of human health, the provision of good quality patient care requires collaboration in multidisciplinary teams. Integrative healthcare provides a unique setting for the study of interprofessional collaboration in the context of power disparities. The research objective was to examine which means and mechanisms were used to facilitate interprofessional collaboration when integrating complementary medicine (CM) into a hospital's surgical department. ⋯ The collaboration between CM practitioners and the department's staff is a loosely coupled system. When coordination was achieved, reaching profound agreements seemed of lesser importance to the parties. Closer collaboration and cross-fertilisation were found among CM practitioners.
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Comparative Study
Blind spots and adverse conditions of care: screening migrants for tuberculosis in France and Germany.
Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease that declined significantly throughout the 20(th) century. Large-scale TB screening of entire populations in France and Germany has thus been replaced by active screening of risk-groups, particularly migrants. ⋯ I overturn the discussion about screening and surveillance of migrants as a risk-group by showing that it is not the stigmatisation of migrants through disease risk that is most at stake, but the invisibility of the most vulnerable among them in disease surveillance data and the way restrictive national immigration policies interfere with and subvert local screening and treatment practices targeting them. The aim of my article is to promote a pragmatic sociology of screening, while paying attention to the practical complexities, political conditions and medical ambivalences of screening and follow-up care, especially when the migrant groups concerned are socially, politically and medically vulnerable.
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In a qualitative study, we investigated the medical motives of 100 Norwegian cannabis users, none of whom had legal access to medical cannabis. Cannabis was used therapeutically for conditions such as multiple sclerosis, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and rheumatism, as well as for quality of life conditions such as quality of sleep, relaxation and wellbeing. The borders between medical and recreational cannabis use were blurred. ⋯ Medical professionals are unable to accept that users may be more knowledgeable than experts and medical users cannot discard the values of traditional cannabis culture. Calls for medical cannabis use are thus perceived as a gambit in attempts to have cannabis legalised. We argue that, despite having had little effect on health authorities, the medical cannabis movement may be having the unintended effect of medicalising cannabis use and using it as a cure for everyday problems.