Today's review will collate articles from:
Sociology of Health & Illness, Vol. 28, no. 5 (July 2006):
Mobilising modern facts: health technology assessment and the politics of evidence.
Carl May
Abstract:
Conventional models of 'evidence' for clinical practice focus on the role of randomised controlled clinical trials and systematic reviews as technologies that promote a specific model of rigour and analytic accountability. The assumption that runs through the disciplinary field of health technology assessment (HTA), for example, is that the quantification of evidence about cost and clinical effectiveness is central to rational policy-making and healthcare provision. But what are the conditions in which such knowledge is mediated into decision-making contexts, and how is it understood and used when it gets there? This paper addresses these questions by examining a series of meetings and seminars attended by senior clinical researchers, social care and health service managers in the UK between 1998–2004, and sessions of the House of Commons Health Committee held in 2001 and 2005. These provide contexts in which questions about the value and utility of evidence produced within the frame of HTA were explored in relation to parallel questions about the design, evaluation and implementation of telemedicine and telecare systems. The paper points to the ways that evidence generated in the normative frame of HTA was increasingly seen as one-dimensional and medicalised knowledge that failed to respond to the contingencies of everyday practice in health and social care settings.
Exclusive versus everyday forms of professional knowledge: legitimacy claims in conventional and alternative medicine.
Kristine A. Hirschkorn
Abstract:
In this paper I present a model of professional knowledge forms that accounts for the different, and sometimes contradictory, ways in which medical doctors (MDs) and various complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practitioners define their competencies and make legitimacy claims. The first section provides a schema for problematising knowledge and its relationship to legitimacy by distinguishing between the context, form and content of professional knowledge. I draw particularly upon Jamous and Peloille's (1970) distinction between the technical or indeterminate forms of professional knowledge. I argue that their characterisation might be enriched by attending to dimensions of 'exclusive' versus 'everyday' knowledge forms. In particular, I point out that both technical and indeterminate forms are amenable to exclusion, or conversely can be made accessible as everyday knowledge. Both forms can thus be employed in attempts to legitimate professional practice. In the final section, I map the current context of CAM and biomedicine onto this expanded professional knowledge map.
Breaking the ceremonial order: patients' and doctors' accounts of removal from a general practitioner's list.
Tim Stokes, Mary Dixon-Woods and Simon Williams
The removal of patients from general practitioners' (GPs) lists in the UK offers important sociological insights into what happens when the doctor-patient relationship 'goes wrong'. An interactionist analysis shows how removers (doctors) and removed (patients) strategically invoke 'rules of conduct' to account for difficulties in the doctor-patient relationship and for GPs' decisions to end their relationships with patients. In this paper we extend this analysis through recourse to Bourdieu's theory of practice, by juxtaposing 'paired' accounts of the same removal event by both remover and removed. Our analysis demonstrates the unthinking or non-reflective nature of people's understanding of the rules governing social interactions, but also demonstrates how apparent rule violations make the rules explicit and expose patterns of power distribution. We argue that removal of patients amounts to a strategic exercise of symbolic power by GPs, and that this is experienced as an overtly violent symbolic act by patients. A theoretical reconciliation of interactionist theories of the doctor-patient relationship with Bourdieu's theory of practice is both possible and profitable, providing a micro-macro link in which issues of capital and power within the health (care) field are brought to the fore.
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Hastings Center Report, Vol. 36, no. 4 (July-August 2006):
No abstracts available (Accordingly, to enhance the indexing features of the Metacrawler, I have added a few keywords to articles the topic of which would not be obvious upon reading the title. These keywords are in parentheses following the italicized title).
The ethics of using QI methods to improve health care quality and safety.
(quality improvement)
Mary Ann Baily, Melissa Bottrell, Joanne Lynn and Bruce Jennings.
What is social and global justice to bioethics or bioethics to social and global justice?
Alex John London.
Outing the hidden curriculum.(in practice).
Anna B. Reisman.
Drugged.(Brief article).
Carl E. Schneider.
Congress's Hybrid Problem.
(stem cell research)
Jonathan D. Moreno.
What is wrong with the physician charter on professionalism.
Lainie Friedman Ross.
May doctors refuse infertility treatments to gay patients?
Jacob M. Appel.
Equity and population health: toward a broader bioethics agenda.
Norman Daniels.
A conservative case for universal access to health care.
Paul Menzel and Donald W. Light.
Smokescreen: the FDA struggles to keep control.
Jessica Berg.
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Disability & Society, Vol. 21, No. 5 (August 2006)
Telling stories for a politics of hope.
Sally French and John Swain.
Contested memories: efforts of the powerful to silence former inmates’ histories of life in an institution for ‘mental defectives.’
Claudia Malacrida.
Barnaby Rudge, ‘idiocy’ and paternalism: assisting the ‘poor idiot.’
Patrick McDonagh.
From ‘cage beds’ to inclusion: the long road for individuals with intellectual disability in the Czech Republic.
Barbara H. Vann and Jan Šiška.
Discursive discrimination of the ‘mentally deficient’ in interwar Sweden.
Kristina Boréus.
Historical perspectives on special education, 1890–1970.
Jane Read and Jan Walmsley.
Othering blindness – on modern epistemological politics.
Michael Schillmeier.
Employment policy and disabled people: old wine in new glasses?
Ardha Danieli and Peter Wheeler.
A genealogy of the disabled identity in relation to work and sexuality.
Rose Galvin.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Shangri-La: foreshadowing the Independent Living Movement in Warm Springs, Georgia, 1926–1945.
Daniel Holland.
Policy-making in the public interest: a contextual analysis of the passage of closed-captioning policy.
Jennifer L. Gregg.
Fighting discrimination through litigation in the UK: the social model of disability and the EU anti-discrimination directive.
Lisa Vanhala.
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