Today, more than 75 percent of pharmaceutical drug trials in the United States are being conducted in the private sector. Once the sole province of academic researchers, these important studies are now being outsourced to non-academic physicians.According to Jill A. Fisher, this major change in the way medical research is performed is the outcome of … Read more

BACKGROUND: Radio frequency identification (RFID) is an emerging technology that is rapidly becoming the standard for hospitals to track inventory, identify patients, and manage personnel. METHODS: Research involved qualitative methods including participant observation and interviews with hospital staff members and industry consultants in the United States. RESULTS: Hospital staff, especially nurses, expressed concern about the … Read more

The abuse of human subjects has always been, and continues to be, a problem in the United States. In spite of regulation to protect subjects, the exploitation of disenfranchised groups and the reproduction of social inequalities are entrenched in the American research enterprise. This paper argues that current approaches to protecting subjects are insufficient because … Read more

This paper aims to expand standard conceptions of current ethical issues by discussing pharmaceutical clinical trials in terms of the broader political economy. Specifically, it explores one important characteristic of the political economy in the United States: the trend towards the neoliberalization of health care. First, it provides an overview of neoliberalism and its manifestations … Read more

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 to describe how individuals respond … Read more

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 on coordinators highlights the ethical … Read more

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 inform developments in public policy, … Read more

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 shifting, contextualized ethics that shape … Read more

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 relationship between physicians and patients, … Read more