Using the concepts of constructivist authenticity and existential authenticity, I will analyse how claims to, and experiences and understandings of authenticity, are central to medical tourism. This is achieved by examining the interplay of places, spaces, objects, practices and bodies that create this cultural phenomenon. This includes a concern with how medical tourism is constructed around and performed through the perceptions of bodies, and the experiences of being a body. It is these complexities and their interdependencies that provide medical tourism its dynamism. This theorizing of medical tourism goes beyond existing studies that primarily seek to define it or restrict it to typologies, by analysing the practices and experiences that actually constitute this significant social phenomenon.
A retrospective review was undertaken to evaluate the frequency and significance of pulmonary activity noted on 306 indium-111 leukocyte studies involving 232 patients with suspected occult infections. Forty-eight studies showed pulmonary activity in one of two patterns of uptake, focal or diffuse. Fourteen of 27 studies (52%) with focal uptake and two of 21 studies (10%) with diffuse uptake were associated with infectious processes. Lung uptake of indium-111-labeled leukocytes was a poor predictor of pulmonary infection in patients studied for occult infection, although the focal pattern was more likely than the diffuse pattern to be associated with infection.
As a qualitative and experiential research method, autoethnography enables students to explore the relationship between their personal, lived experiences with wider social structures and forces, thus actively developing and engaging their sociological imagination. However, while various studies advocate the use of autoethnography as a learning and assessment tool, no study explores the acquisition of knowledge and learning from the student's perspective. This is the first study that explores student reactions to and experiences of autoethnography as an assessment and learning tool in sociology. Through the feedback of 15 undergraduate students on qualitative open-ended surveys, this article shows that autoethnography actively engaged the students and enhanced their sociological learning by stimulating their critical thinking on the relationship between their lived experiences and the social. While there are some ethical issues that need to be considered when assigning an autoethnography as an assessment item, the potential benefits for students, as identified by them, far outweigh the possible negatives.
End-stage renal failure is a life-threatening condition, often treated with home-based peritoneal dialysis (PD). PD is a demanding regimen, and the patients who practise it must make numerous lifestyle changes and learn complicated biomedical techniques. In our experience, the renal nurses who provide most PD education frequently express concerns that patient compliance with their teaching is poor. These concerns are mirrored in the renal literature. It has been argued that the perceived failure of health professionals to improve compliance rates with PD regimens is because 'compliance' itself has never been adequately conceptualized or defined; thus, it is difficult to operationalize and quantify. This paper examines how a group of Australian renal nurses construct patient compliance with PD therapy. These empirical data illuminate how PD compliance operates in one practice setting; how it is characterized by multiple and often competing energies; and how ultimately it might be pointless to try to tame 'compliance' through rigid definitions and measurement, or to rigidly enforce it in PD patients. The energies involved are too fractious and might be better spent, as many of the more experienced nurses in this study argue, in augmenting the energies that do work well together to improve patient outcomes.
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