Alex Broom
Biographic Data
| ID | 99557 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alex Broom |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alex |
| FAMILY NAME | Broom |
| SIGNATURE | BROOM A |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1258-1140 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 164 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 982 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 162 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
A World of Resistance: India and the Global Antibiotic Crisis
A sweeping analysis uncovers the causes of—and solutions to—one of the most daunting public health challenges facing the world today: antibiotic resistance exploding in India. The discovery of antibiotics was one of the most significant medical breakthroughs of the twentieth century, dramatically increasing human lifespans. Yet today, with antibiotic-resistant superbugs implicated in as many deaths as HIV/AIDS and malaria combined, the limits of …
Rethinking fussiness in commercial food contexts
So-called ‘fussy’ or ‘picky’ eating has been construed as a problem of parenting feeding practices and children’s defiant eating behaviours. However, this ‘fussiness’ about food unfolds in a food environment rife with misleading marketing messages, conflicting information, and the widespread availability of ultra-processed food (UPF). Where fussiness leads to dietary patterns high in UPF, it can have significant implications for a child’s life-lo…
Caring infrastructures for sexual health and the implications of antibiotic-resistant STIs
Infrastructures fundamentally shape sexual health, but their gaps and failings often only come into view during moments of crisis. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a looming microbiological and global societal crisis, and one that is posing increasing challenges and risks for medical practice and public health alike. In sexual health, concerns have been raised about growing resistance in Neisseria gonorrhoeae and the less well-known Mycoplasma g…
How Algorithmic Technologies ‘Constitute’ the Older Body: A Study of Fall‐Detection Wearables
The cultural politics of the ‘problematic’ ageing body have led to a search for solutions in the form of algorithmic technologies. In this article, we look at one problem associated with the ageing body—unintentional falls—and one proposed algorithmic intervention: wearable fall‐detection technology. In dialogue with sociologists concerned with the cultural politics of the older body, we aim to understand what contribution this fledgling technolo…
Precarious living in the age of precision medicine: The impasse of chronic malignancy
Owing in large part to the rise of precision medicine, cancers that were once considered ‘terminal’ now often entail long-term treatability alongside ongoing incurability. The resulting chronic malignancy is fundamentally reconfiguring the meaning and experience of living with cancer and – we argue – illustrates some of the key features of precarious living, more generally. Drawing on 132 in-depth interviews and building from Lauren Berlant’s ide…
Friendship and the Sociality of GBTQ+ Sexual Health in Times of Resistance
Sexual health has always been a social matter. While the science of disease transmission remains a focus for public health stakeholders, for social scientists, the sociality of infections, both enduring and emerging, remains central. That is, friendships and relationships are core to health, risk and illness. Yet, there has been virtually no work on how friendships and their varying contours are interplaying with (increasingly) antibiotic resista…
Accounting for Death: Economising (the End of) Life
Death is a highly and increasingly economised process in which individual, family, institutional and state finances play important, but often opaque, roles in shaping the contours of dying. Drawing on 44 in-depth interviews with people who are dying, their family and their healthcare providers, this article explores how economic rationalities profoundly shape almost every dimension of their experiences of the end of life. Circulating within this …
System-practice entanglements and the harms of Ultra-Processed Foods
Men’s Experiences with Fatherhood in Heterosexual Relationships: A Narrative Analysis
The restructuring of gender identities and shifting social expectations of fathers have resulted in increased interest in understanding contemporary discourses about involved fathering. This article contributes to that scholarship by providing a narrative analysis about men’s experiences with fatherhood in heterosexual relationships. Drawing from a photovoice study with 16 fathers, we report three discrete but interrelated narratives. The first n…
Breaking or Repairing Long-Term Care for Older People: AI Delegation and the Carefication of Later Life
From robots to chatbots, AI technologies in care (nursing) homes have gained policymakers’ attention amid critical issues like staffing shortages. Concurrently, the long-term care sector has become a prime target for technologists due to its global market potential given the growing ageing population. Drawing conceptually on ideas of breakdown and repair, we explore socio-technical discourses of AI-based care for later life. We combine Bruno Lato…
Speculative Frontiers of Technoscience and Innovation: Academic Scientists’ Engagement with Promissory and Emerging Technologies in Everyday Practice
This paper revisits nanotechnology as a once-speculative field that attracted significant interest from science and technology studies (STS) scholars during its promissory phase, yet has received comparatively little attention now that it is partially institutionalised and entangled in the everyday practices of research and innovation. We approach nanotechnology as a compelling case that now offers the opportunity to study what becomes of technos…
The school lunchbox as a social problem
School lunchboxes contain much more than just food. Maternal and paternal moralities, socioeconomic pressures, and the character of contemporary food systems can all be found within them. Lunchboxes, in turn, are microcosms of food system shifts, including the proliferation of highly-profitable, strategically-engineered ultra-processed foods. These commodities, often representing between 40% and 80% of energy intake depending on contexts, are hav…
Future/tense: A sociology of temporal dis/order
The last few years of pandemic living have highlighted various temporal tensions that characterise our individual and collective futures. In some ways, the scale of temporal disruption caused by the pandemic could be considered unprecedented. But in other ways, the temporal tensions that underpin social life are long-standing, even routine. In this special issue, ‘Future/Tense: A Sociology of Temporal Dis/Order’, we take the intensification of te…
Mediated Urgency: Exploring GBTQ+ Perceptions of Antibiotic‐Resistant Sexually Transmitted Infections
Often, research takes place once a health issue is already at ‘crisis’ point. However, health professionals and populations can have different understandings of ‘urgency’. At present, health authorities, scientists and other medical professionals are increasingly concerned about escalating antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in the context of STIs. Clinicians worry about Neisseria gonorrhoeae becoming progressively resistant to last‐line treatment, as…
The (Anti)Microbial Gaze: Surveillance Meets Resistance
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a rapidly escalating global health threat, known increasingly through different forms of monitoring. Surveillance, both of resistant organisms and of the antimicrobial prescribing practices that contribute to their proliferation, has increased dramatically over the last decade. So too have audits, which are routinely deployed to evaluate, and ensure accountability for, the alignment of local prescribing practices…
Chronic Concealment and Awareness in the Affective Worlds of Young People Living With Chronic Illness
From the onset of chronic illness, a variety of challenges emerge-challenges that both persist and evolve as life progresses. For young adults living with chronic illness, the age-specific difficulties of becoming ill while young form a foundation that shapes their experience of illness in enduring ways. This paper draws on a series of in-depth qualitative interviews with 33 young adults (aged 19-29 years old) living with a range of chronic illne…
Cultures of Activity, Cultivating Resistance
The problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is often viewed through biomedical and/or behavioral lenses, with the underlying economic principles and "headwinds" shaping resistance less visible. In this paper, we focus on how healthcare funding models structure the ways AMR is perceived and addressed as an institutional priority. Specifically, we explore how activity-based funding reflects and operationalizes ingrained assumptions about what is …
GBTQ+ safe sex entanglements: Finding the bacterial in the age of resistant STIs and prevention innovation
Few studies have explored community experiences of our increasingly resistant bacterial landscape, and, in the sphere of sexually transmissible infections (STIs) and antimicrobial resistance, there is even greater absence of community-centred research. This is despite a growth in STI transmission worldwide, which, alongside accelerated resistance, will disproportionately affect GBTQ+ (gay, bisexual, trans, queer+) populations. In this article, dr…
Tensions of time at the end (of life)
Perhaps the most valuable asset in our cultural imaginary is time. Yet, this notion of time-as-asset intensifies, is contested, and is often derailed at the end of life. When faced with death, time can become many things, including both personal and interpersonal asset and liability. Bringing the concept of time and dying into focus, this paper draws on qualitative interviews with 15 people nearing death in an Australian specialist palliative car…
Medical ambivalence and Long Covid: The disconnects, entanglements, and productivities shaping ethnic minority experiences in the UK
Structural violence - related to 'isms' like racism, sexism, and ableism - pertains to the ways in which social institutions harm certain groups. Such violence is critical to institutional indifference to the plight of ethnic minority people living with long-term health conditions. With only emergent literature on the lived experiences of ethnic minorities with Long Covid, we sought to investigate experiences around the interplay of illness and s…
Sampling and recruiting LGBTQ+ populations in health research: Reflections on community consultations about antibiotic resistant STIs
In this paper, we explore negotiations around sexuality and gender diverse identities together with sexual practices, and the materialities of bodies, as they relate to the sampling and recruitment of LGBTQ+ participants in health social science research. The basis of our research note is a reflection on our experiences of undertaking a study on the social dimensions of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in the context of sexually transmitted infecti…
It's very hard to have a future when you can't travel: Meaning, mobility and mortality after a cancer diagnosis
Being diagnosed with a life-limiting illness entails a fundamental reshaping of one's relationship with the future. From 'bucket lists' of destinations and experiences to 'flights of hope' for experimental or specialised medical care, diagnoses of serious illness are deeply entwined with travel in Australian cultural narratives. In this paper, we draw on a thematic analysis of interviews with cancer patients and their carers to ask what meanings …
Living and Dying in Shadow Times
Normative time frameworks obscure the ontological ambiguities of lived time, particularly in relation to illness and death. These forms of ambiguous lived time constitute what we call 'shadow time' - the unnoticed and the unknowable in our dominant temporal order. We examine what we call 'diagnostic time', 'prognostic time', 'terminal time' and 'mourning time' as shades of shadow time that elude the ordering of time that orders life. A critical s…
Dying as a Collective Encounter: Relationality and Affect at the End of Life
The end of life is replete with relational complexities. Yet, despite the work of humanities and social science scholars in the field of death and dying, our final days and weeks are still often framed through a highly individualistic lens. As a result, the collective encounters of dying can become sidelined within the management of an individual's embodied journey. This, in some cases, has the effect of obscuring the presence and power of collec…
Treatment 'cultures', sexually transmitted infections and the rise of antimicrobial resistance
In this article, we examine the current management of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), in the context of rising antimicrobial resistance (AMR), through the lens of 'treatment cultures'. Prevailing treatment cultures-including the prominence of syndromic care for STIs-foster certain possibilities and foreclose others, with important consequences for countering AMR. Drawing on qualitative interviews with STI professionals, experts and indust…
The end of life and the family: Hospice Patients' Views on Dying as Relational
The end of life is a highly emotive and critical period in the life course and families often play a central role during this time. Despite significant sociological work on dying as a relational experience, there has been little exploration of the significance of contemporary family structures and relations. In this article, drawing on the accounts of twenty hospice in-patients, we explore how the end of life (in this case within an in-patient un…
Virtually He@lthy: The Impact of Internet Use on Disease Experience and the Doctor-Patient Relationship
In the current study, the author explores the complex effects and contradictory roles of the Internet as a source of empowerment and control, and as a site of 'risk management.' Drawing on a study of the Internet usage of Australian men with prostate cancer, the author investigates how access to information and online support affects men's experiences of disease and, in particular, the possible implications of Internet-informed patients for the d…
Cultures of resistance? A Bourdieusian analysis of doctors' antibiotic prescribing
The role of gender, environment and Individual biography in shaping qualitative interview data
Reflexivity is a key aspect of qualitative research. Considerable attention has been given to the ways in which gender mediates the production and analysis of qualitative data; however, much of this has been focused on qualitative interviews with women and the influence of the interviewer’s gender in this specific context. Very little work has been done on comparing different interviewer–interviewee contexts such as male‐to‐female, male‐to‐male o…
Therapeutic pluralism? Evidence, power and legitimacy in UK cancer services
The integration of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) into cancer services is increasingly discussed as a potential part of UK health policy but as yet there has been little sociological research examining this process. This paper examines the results of a study on the provision of CAM to cancer patients in two distinct organisational contexts: the hospice and the hospital. It is based on interviews with medical specialists, nursing sta…
The inequalities of medical pluralism: Hierarchies of health, the politics of tradition and the economies of care in Indian oncology
Qualitative Researchers' Understandings of Their Practice and the Implications for Data Archiving and Sharing
With the systematic archiving of qualitative data emerging as a distinct possibility in Australia, both the practices of qualitative research and how subsequent outputs are 'used' are coming under increased scrutiny and reflection. Drawing on a series of focus groups with qualitative researchers, this article critically explores the meanings ascribed to qualitative research practice and the perceived challenges posed by contemporary innovations i…
The Dialectical Tension Between Individuation and Depersonalization in Cancer Patients' Mediation of Complementary, Alternative and Biomedical Cancer Treatments
Drawing on in-depth interviews with cancer patients, this article examines patients' perspectives on the nature of evidence and the degree to which different understandings of evidence inform decision-making about complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and biomedical cancer treatments. Results illustrate the ways in which many cancer patients critically engage with questions about the nature of knowledge and the potential pitfalls of scienc…
Photovoice Ethics: Critical Reflections From Men's Mental Health Research
As photovoice continues to grow as a method for researching health and illness, there is a need for rigorous discussions about ethical considerations. In this article, we discuss three key ethical issues arising from a recent photovoice study investigating men's depression and suicide. The first issue, indelible images, details the complexity of consent and copyright when participant-produced photographs are shown at exhibitions and online where …
Locating care at the end of life: Burden, Vulnerability, and the Practical Accomplishment of Dying
Home is frequently idealised as the preferred location for end-of-life care, while in-patient hospital care is viewed with suspicion and fear. Yet many people with a terminal illness spend their final days in some form of medicalised institutional setting, such as a specialist palliative care in-patient unit. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with in-patients at a specialist palliative care unit, we focus on their difficulties in finding a be…
Medical specialists' accounts of the impact of the Internet on the doctor/patient relationship
In the context of health service delivery, deprofessionalization denotes a trend towards a demystification of medical expertise and increasing lay scepticism about health professionals, suggesting a decline in the power and status of the medical profession. This process has been linked to increasing consumerism, the rise of complementary medicine and the emergence of the Internet. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with prostate cancer spec…
The eMale: Prostate cancer, masculinity and online support as a challenge to medical expertise
This article argues that experiences of, and attitudes towards, online communities are deeply embedded in understandings of masculinity, the perceived character of the Internet, and changes in the roles of the patient and the expert within decision-making processes. Drawing on the accounts of a group of Australian men with prostate cancer and prostate cancer specialists, this qualitative study explores experiences of online support groups. Result…
Masculinity, moralities and being cared for: An exploration of experiences of living and dying in a hospice
Evidence-based healthcare in practice: A study of clinician resistance, professional de-skilling, and inter-specialty differentiation in oncology
Exploring the Temporal Dimension in Cancer Patients' Experiences of Nonbiomedical Therapeutics
To date, research on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use by cancer patients has tended to provide a "snapshot" of experience, with little attention given to the evolution of experience over time. Drawing on data from solicited diaries, this article examines individual cancer patients' temporal experiences of CAM. Our findings suggest that experiences of CAM are variable over time and space, and furthermore, that the everyday act of "…
On waiting, hauntings and surviving: Chronicling life with cancer through solicited diaries
The 'typical' trajectory of a person with cancer has been from diagnosis, through treatment, and towards cure (life) or the end of life (death). Yet, cancer survivorship as a social practice is no longer contained by such neat categorisations. Much of the lived experience of cancer now centres on: living with, rather than beyond, disease; the perpetuity of treatment rather than the spectre of disease; and, making sense of incurability. Using a so…
Intuition, Subjectivity, and Le Bricoleur: Cancer Patients' Accounts of Negotiating a Plurality of Therapeutic Options
Cancer patients are now combining complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) with biomedical cancer treatments, reflecting an increasingly pluralistic health care environment. However, there has been little research done on the ways in which cancer patients juggle multiplicity in claims to expertise, models of disease, and therapeutic practice. Drawing on the accounts of cancer patients who use CAM, in this article I develop a conceptualization…
The administration of harm: From unintended consequences to harm by design
Harm is a recurring theme in the social sciences. Scholars in a range of empirical areas have documented the deleterious outcomes that at times emerge from social structures, institutions and systems of governance. Yet these harms have often been presented under the rubric of ‘unintended consequences’. The outcomes of systems are designed to appear devoid of intentionality, in motion without any clear agency involved, and are thus particularly ad…
The art of letting go: Referral to palliative care and its discontents
The role of the Internet in cancer patients' engagement with complementary and alternative treatments
This article draws on a study of 80 National Health Service cancer patients and their experiences of using the Internet within disease and treatment processes. It focuses on the role the Internet plays in the context of potential or actual engagement with complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). The results depart from previous conceptualizations of the Internet as a major source of CAM knowledge, and second, as a major pathway to patient CA…
On the meanings and experiences of living and dying in an Australian hospice
Drawing on qualitative interviews with patients near death, in this article we explore people's experiences of living and dying in a hospice in-patient unit. The results illustrate the tensions and complexities of entering into the hospice environment and how its character (i.e. people, interactions and spaces) shapes experiences near death.The results illustrate the hospice in-patient unit as playing a vitally important role in supporting the en…
A sociology of precision-in-practice: The affective and temporal complexities of everyday clinical care
The idea of 'precision medicine', which has gained increasing traction since the early 2000s, is now ubiquitous in health and medicine. Though varied in its implementation across fields, precision medicine has raised hopes of revolutionary treatments and has spurred the proliferation of novel therapeutics, the alteration of professional trajectories and various reconfigurations of health/care. Nowhere is the promise of precision medicine more app…
The Troubles of Telling: Managing Communication About the End of Life
Communication about palliative care represents one of the most difficult interpersonal aspects of medicine. Delivering the "terminal" diagnosis has traditionally been the focus of research, yet transitions to specialist palliative care are equally critical clinical moments. Here we focus on 20 medical specialists' strategies for engaging patients around referral to specialist palliative care. Our aim was to develop an understanding of the logics …
Entangled and Estranged: Living and Dying in Relation (to Cancer)
Serious illness has typically been explored as emergent within the relatively linear unfolding of the steady march of time. Here, focusing on cancer and drawing on the accounts of patient/carer dyads, we propose a relational ontology of the affective and temporal entanglements of living-with disease. Emphasising the iterative intra-activity of vital matter and social meaning as they are repatterned across time, we examine the enfolding of various…
The Liminal and the Parallax: Living and Dying at the End of Life
Transitions to palliative care can involve a shift in philosophy from life-prolonging to life-enhancing care. People living with a life-limiting illness will often receive palliative care through specialist outpatient clinics, while also being cared for by another medical specialty. Experiences of this point of care have been described as being liminal in character, that is, somewhere between living and dying. Drawing on experiences of illness an…
State of the Art: A Decade of Health Sociology in Review
This paper reports on a review of health sociology in Australia from 1990 till present. The authors searched all the major databases for health social sciences including Medline, CINAHL, Sociological Abstracts and Australian Medical Index. Methodological difficulties in capturing all such work are outlined first. Examination of the citations revealed a significant increase in research and commentary in the discipline, and a continued (since the l…
Virtually He@lthy: The Impact of Internet Use on Disease Experience and the Doctor-Patient Relationship
In the current study, the author explores the complex effects and contradictory roles of the Internet as a source of empowerment and control, and as a site of 'risk management.' Drawing on a study of the Internet usage of Australian men with prostate cancer, the author investigates how access to information and online support affects men's experiences of disease and, in particular, the possible implications of Internet-informed patients for the d…
Medical specialists' accounts of the impact of the Internet on the doctor/patient relationship
In the context of health service delivery, deprofessionalization denotes a trend towards a demystification of medical expertise and increasing lay scepticism about health professionals, suggesting a decline in the power and status of the medical profession. This process has been linked to increasing consumerism, the rise of complementary medicine and the emergence of the Internet. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with prostate cancer spec…
The eMale: Prostate cancer, masculinity and online support as a challenge to medical expertise
This article argues that experiences of, and attitudes towards, online communities are deeply embedded in understandings of masculinity, the perceived character of the Internet, and changes in the roles of the patient and the expert within decision-making processes. Drawing on the accounts of a group of Australian men with prostate cancer and prostate cancer specialists, this qualitative study explores experiences of online support groups. Result…
Reflections on the centrality of power in medical sociology: An empirical test and theoretical elaboration
This paper explores the contemporary relevance of sociological theorisations centred on medical power, including the medical dominance and deprofessionalisation theses. To achieve this it examines two issues that have been tentatively linked to the relative decline of the power and autonomy of biomedicine - complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and the Internet-informed patient. Drawing on these two different but interconnected social phen…
Inter-Professional Conflict and Strategic Alliance Between Traditional Healers and Oncologists in Pakistan
There are increasing calls from global health organisations for the promotion of traditional medicines (TM) as one method of addressing the health needs of populations in poorer countries. However, little research has been done to explore the interactions (and potential conflicts between) traditional healthcare systems and biomedical services. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 46 cancer patients in Lahore, Pakistan, this article examines…
Cancer Patients' Negotiation of Therapeutic Options in Pakistan
Cancer is the second leading cause of death in Pakistan. There is increasing evidence that patients are using a range of (biomedical and nonbiomedical) therapeutic options for cancer treatment. To date there has been no sociologically informed research into the engagement of cancer patients in Pakistan with available modalities. In this article, the authors present findings from the first such study. They purposively sampled 46 cancer patients fr…
Oncologists' and specialist cancer nurses' approaches to complementary and alternative medicine and their impact on patient action
The Dialectical Tension Between Individuation and Depersonalization in Cancer Patients' Mediation of Complementary, Alternative and Biomedical Cancer Treatments
Drawing on in-depth interviews with cancer patients, this article examines patients' perspectives on the nature of evidence and the degree to which different understandings of evidence inform decision-making about complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and biomedical cancer treatments. Results illustrate the ways in which many cancer patients critically engage with questions about the nature of knowledge and the potential pitfalls of scienc…
Therapeutic pluralism? Evidence, power and legitimacy in UK cancer services
The integration of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) into cancer services is increasingly discussed as a potential part of UK health policy but as yet there has been little sociological research examining this process. This paper examines the results of a study on the provision of CAM to cancer patients in two distinct organisational contexts: the hospice and the hospital. It is based on interviews with medical specialists, nursing sta…
The role of gender, environment and Individual biography in shaping qualitative interview data
Reflexivity is a key aspect of qualitative research. Considerable attention has been given to the ways in which gender mediates the production and analysis of qualitative data; however, much of this has been focused on qualitative interviews with women and the influence of the interviewer’s gender in this specific context. Very little work has been done on comparing different interviewer–interviewee contexts such as male‐to‐female, male‐to‐male o…
Exploring the Temporal Dimension in Cancer Patients' Experiences of Nonbiomedical Therapeutics
To date, research on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use by cancer patients has tended to provide a "snapshot" of experience, with little attention given to the evolution of experience over time. Drawing on data from solicited diaries, this article examines individual cancer patients' temporal experiences of CAM. Our findings suggest that experiences of CAM are variable over time and space, and furthermore, that the everyday act of "…
The role of the Internet in cancer patients' engagement with complementary and alternative treatments
This article draws on a study of 80 National Health Service cancer patients and their experiences of using the Internet within disease and treatment processes. It focuses on the role the Internet plays in the context of potential or actual engagement with complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). The results depart from previous conceptualizations of the Internet as a major source of CAM knowledge, and second, as a major pathway to patient CA…
The problematic nature of conflating use and advocacy in CAM integration: Complexity and differentiation in UK cancer patients' views
The integration of complementary and alternative medicine into cancer care is widely debated. Advocates of integration frequently cite the popularity of such therapies amongst patients in support of their case. However, little specific empirical attention has been given to how integration is actually regarded by these patients. Based on semi structured interviews with 80 cancer patients in the UK, this article examines the assumption of a link be…
Archiving Qualitative Data in Australia: An Introduction
The prospect of the digital archiving of qualitative data for re‐use and analysis by other researchers is now a distinct reality in Australia following the development of similar facilities in the UK, the US and Finland. While these archives are now well‐established and have become reasonably well‐accepted among the scholarly community, their development has not been uncontroversial and has stimulated much debate about the desirability and feasib…
Intuition, Subjectivity, and Le Bricoleur: Cancer Patients' Accounts of Negotiating a Plurality of Therapeutic Options
Cancer patients are now combining complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) with biomedical cancer treatments, reflecting an increasingly pluralistic health care environment. However, there has been little research done on the ways in which cancer patients juggle multiplicity in claims to expertise, models of disease, and therapeutic practice. Drawing on the accounts of cancer patients who use CAM, in this article I develop a conceptualization…
The inequalities of medical pluralism: Hierarchies of health, the politics of tradition and the economies of care in Indian oncology
Evidence-based healthcare in practice: A study of clinician resistance, professional de-skilling, and inter-specialty differentiation in oncology
Oncology clinicians' accounts of discussing complementary and alternative medicine with their patients
The profile of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has risen dramatically over recent years, with cancer patients representing some of the highest users of any patient group. This article reports the results from a series of in-depth interviews with oncology consultants and oncology nurses in two hospitals in Australia. Analysis identifies a range of self-reported approaches with which oncology clinicians discuss CAM, highlighting the po…
I'd forgotten about me in all of this: Discourses of self-healing, positivity and vulnerability in cancer patients' experiences of complementary and alternative medicine
Drawing on in-depth interviews with Australian cancer patients, this article examines their experiences of utilizing complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) within disease and treatment processes. Results illustrate the complex and often contradictory roles played by CAM within patients' therapeutic trajectories. On the one hand, their accounts illustrate the liberating and positive impacts of CAM engagement, including perceived increases in…
Qualitative Researchers' Understandings of Their Practice and the Implications for Data Archiving and Sharing
With the systematic archiving of qualitative data emerging as a distinct possibility in Australia, both the practices of qualitative research and how subsequent outputs are 'used' are coming under increased scrutiny and reflection. Drawing on a series of focus groups with qualitative researchers, this article critically explores the meanings ascribed to qualitative research practice and the perceived challenges posed by contemporary innovations i…
Health and healing in South Asia
We write this introduction to this special issue on health, culture and religion at a time of significant global economic turmoil. We are already beginning to see impacts for health in the ‘developed’ world, but even more in the ‘developing’ world
The practice and meanings of spiritual healing in Nepal
Most of the Nepalese population use various forms of traditional medicine (TM) as their primary form of health care. Biomedical health-care services are currently extremely limited and are largely situated in urban settings. Despite widespread reliance on TM in contemporary Nepal, we know relatively little about the roles and uses of traditional medicine and the sociocultural impacts of a diverse therapeutic landscape. Drawing on a series of in-d…
The Prevalence and Politics of HIV/Aids in Zimbabwe: Examining the Ideological, Political and Historical Factors Behind the ‘Decline
The reported reduction in the prevalence level of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in Zimbabwe has been represented as one of the most significant and rapid declines within any population since the epidemic emerged as a public health issue. This paper explains how this development has been reported, challenged and eventually owned by many of the diverse stakeholders who constitute Zimbabwe's overall AIDS response. The Zimbabwean government …
Medicinas Alternativas e Complementares: Uma Metassíntese
O aumento do uso de Medicinas Alternativas e Complementares (MAC) motivou o crescimento do número de estudos qualitativos sobre o tema, justificando a realização de sínteses sobre esse material. Este artigo apresenta uma revisão sistemática de pesquisas qualitativas sobre MAC publicadas em periódicos internacionais. Esta revisão se orientou pela metodologia dos metaestudos. Foi realizada busca em revistas do Portal Periódicos da Coordenação de Ap…
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