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Procedural Misconceptions and Informed Consent

December 20, 2016
This paper provides a simultaneously reflexive and analytical framework to think about obstacles to truly informed consent in social science and biomedical research. To do so, it argues that informed consent often goes awry due to procedural misconceptions built into the research context. The concept of procedural misconception is introduced...

Co-Ordinating ‘Ethical’ Clinical Trials

December 20, 2016
Change in the way new drugs are developed, including the privatisation of clinical trials, has altered the arrangement and roles of healthcare professions. In this paper I examine one aspect of this change: the role of research coordinators in the conduct of contract research in the United States. My focus...

(Book Review) Narrating the New Predictive Genetics

December 20, 2016
In her monograph, Monica Konrad is engaged in several important intellectual projects that compete for centrality in the analysis of her ethnographic data. These projects include the following contributions: adding to the empirical record regarding genetic testing and decision-making, challenging the boundaries of bioethics discourse, arguing for engaged scholarship to...

Practicing Research Ethics

December 20, 2016
This paper focuses on constructions of research ethics by primary care physicians in the USA as they engage in contract research for the pharmaceutical industry. Drawing first on historical studies of physicians as investigators and then on 12 months of qualitative fieldwork in the Southwestern US, this paper analyzes the...

Playing Patient, Playing Doctor

December 20, 2016
This article deploys sadomasochism as a framework for understanding medical practice on an institutional level. By examining the case of the factitious illness Munchausen syndrome, this article analyzes the operations of power in the doctor-patient relationship through the trope of role-playing. Because Munchausen syndrome causes a disruption to the dyadic...

Investigating the Barons

December 20, 2016
Recounting stories of the 18th-century Baron von Münchhausen, the unauthorized appropriation of his name into literature, and Richard Asher’s subsequent medical use of the name Munchausen 150 years later, this article examines the narratives that are told about and through Munchausen syndrome that create meaning within medicine. By analyzing a...

Indoor Positioning and Digital Management

December 20, 2016
Not all surveillance is intended as such. In spite of intentions, the valence of some technological systems toward surveillance should not be underestimated. Within the domain of health care, there has been an increased emphasis on the use of information and communication technologies to streamline processes by centralizing patients’ records,...