Empathetic knowledge: conceptualising modes of knowing within families marked by illness.

While many sociologists have conceptualised medical and experiential modes of knowing health and illness, less attention has been given to the concept of empathetic knowledge. That is, knowledge derived from close association with others living with a particular condition. This article investigates empathetic modes of knowing among families marked by illness, drawing on 52 h of video recordings of support group sessions for children of parents with mental illness in Denmark and interviews with 11 participating children.

The Right to Rehabilitation for People With Dementia: A Codesign Approach to Barriers and Solutions.

Introduction: People with dementia of all ages have a human right to equal access to quality health care. Despite evidence regarding its effectiveness, many people living with dementia are unable to access rehabilitation for promoting function and quality of life. Conducted in Australia, this study was designed to (1) explore barriers to access to dementia rehabilitation and (2) identify solutions that improve access to rehabilitation.

Navigating artificial intelligence in care homes: Competing stakeholder views of trust and logics of care.

The COVID-19 pandemic shed light on systemic issues plaguing care (nursing) homes, from staff shortages to substandard healthcare. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, including robots and chatbots, have been proposed as solutions to such issues. Yet, socio-ethical concerns about the implications of AI for health and care practices have also been growing among researchers and practitioners.

The relatives of people with depression: A systematic review and methodological critique of qualitative studies.

Being a close relative of a person with depression can take a heavy toll on the former, but these relatives are increasingly made responsible for taking on extensive carer roles. Research on relatives of people with depression is currently dominated by a focus on "carer burden" and although such a focus can explain many relatives' experiences and daily lives, it provides very limited insight into the everyday life of a person living with someone with depression. Therefore, we scoped qualitative research on people who are relatives of people living with depression and identified knowledge gaps caused by explicit or implicit theoretical or methodological assumptions.

Competing realities, uncertain diagnoses of infectious disease: Mass self-testing for COVID-19 and liminal bio-citizenship.

Diagnoses of infectious diseases are being transformed as mass self-testing using rapid antigen tests (RATs) is increasingly integrated into public health. Widely used during the COVID-19 pandemic, RATs are claimed to have many advantages over 'gold-standard' polymerase chain reaction tests, especially their ease of use and production of quick results. Yet, while laboratory studies indicate the value of RATs in detecting the SARS-CoV-2 virus antigen, uncertainty surrounds their deployment and ultimate effectiveness in stemming infections.

Artificial Intelligence in Long-Term Care: Technological Promise, Aging Anxieties, and Sociotechnical Ageism.

This article explores views about older people and aging underpinning practices and perceptions of development and implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in long-term care homes (LTC). Drawing on semi-structured interviews with seven AI developers, seven LTC staff, and four LTC advocates, we analyzed how AI technologies for later life are imagined, designed, deployed, and resisted. Using the concepts of "promissory discourse" and "aging anxieties", we investigated manifestations of ageism in accounts of AI applications in LTC.

'A platform for goodness, not for badness': The heuristics of hope in patients' evaluations of online health information.

Patient advocates and activists are increasingly relying on online health information that can assist them to manage their health condition. Yet once online, they will confront diverse information whose veracity and utility are difficult to determine. This article offers a sociological analysis of the practical methods, or heuristics, that patient advocates and activists use when making judgements about the credibility and utility of online information.

Searching for diagnostic certainty, governing risk: Patients' ambivalent experiences of medical testing.

Diagnosis is pivotal to medicine's epistemic system: it serves to explain individual symptoms, classify them into recognizable conditions and determine their prognosis and treatment. Medical tests, or investigative procedures for detecting and monitoring disease, play a central role in diagnosis. While testing promises diagnostic certainty or a definitive risk assessment, it often produces uncertainties and new questions which call for yet further tests.

Focus issue introduction: Advanced Solid-State Lasers 2020.

This Joint Issue of Optics Express and Optical Materials Express features 15 articles written by authors who participated in the international online conference Advanced Solid State Lasers held 13-16 October, 2020. This review provides a summary of the conference and these articles from the conference which sample the spectrum of solid state laser theory and experiment, from materials research to sources and from design innovation to applications.

Feeling less alone online: patients' ambivalent engagements with digital media.

Digital media offer the chronically ill, especially those who experience related isolation, unparalleled opportunities to connect with others. This article asks, how do these individuals ascribe meaning to and use these media to manage their condition and related isolation? Using the concepts of affordance and emotional community, and drawing on the findings from an Australian study on patients' use of digital media, we examine individuals' ambivalent ascriptions of media, which are both feared and distrusted for the risks they present and embraced as invaluable tools of social connection. We argue that this ambivalence is explicable in terms of the communities to which the chronically ill belong which are founded on strong emotional bonds.

Advanced Solid-State Lasers 2019: focus issue introduction.

This joint issue of Optics Express and Optical Materials Express features 17 state-of-the art articles written by authors who participated in the international conference Advanced Solid-State Lasers held in Vienna, Austria, from September 29 to October 3, 2019. This introduction provides a summary of these articles that cover numerous areas of solid-state lasers from materials research to sources and from design to experimental demonstration.

Managing risks or generating uncertainties? Ambiguous ontologies of testing in Australian healthcare.

Medical testing promises to establish certainty by providing a definitive assessment of risk or diagnosis. But can those who rely on tests to offer advice or make clinical decisions be assured of this certainty? This article examines how Australian health professionals, namely clinicians, microbiologists, specialist physicians and health policymakers, delineate the boundary between certainty and uncertainty in their accounts of medical testing. Applying concepts from science and technology studies, and drawing on qualitative data from a sociological study of testing in Australian healthcare, we consider how professionals ascribe meaning to testing and test results.

Navigating the cartographies of trust: how patients and carers establish the credibility of online treatment claims.

Digital media offer citizens novel ways of 'enacting' health and illness, and treatment and care. However, while digital media may so 'empower' citizens, those searching for credible information will be confronted with various, often-conflicting claims that may have 'disempowering' effects. This article uses Gieryn's concept of the 'cultural cartography' to explore the criteria that patients and carers employ in establishing the credibility of information on alleged treatments.

Focus issue introduction: advanced solid-state lasers.

This joint issue of Optics Express and Optical Materials Express features 28 state-of-the-art articles written by authors who participated in the international "Advanced Solid State Lasers" conference, held in Boston November 4-8, 2018. This review provides a summary of these articles that cover the spectrum of solid state lasers from materials research to sources and from design innovation to applications.

Matters of fact and politics: Generating expectations of cancer screening.

Many countries, including Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States have established national screening programs in the effort to advance the early diagnosis of cancers. Australia has population screening programs for breast, bowel and cervical cancers, and this article focuses on breast and cervical cancer screening as the two longest running programs in Australia. While these screening programs are well-established and report relatively high participation rates, the effectiveness of population screening is a contested issue, subject to significant, ongoing debate about its purported benefits (Armstrong, 2019).

From the margins to mainstream: How providers of autologous 'stem cell treatments' legitimise their practice in Australia.

This article examines how Australian providers of unproven autologous 'stem cell treatments' legitimise these products and their practices. We focus on the strategies employed by providers in their efforts to create and sustain a market for procedures that have yet to be proven safe and clinically efficacious. Drawing on the work of Thomas Gieryn and Pierre Bourdieu and the findings of research involving an analysis of direct-to-consumer online advertising of clinics that sell purported 'stem cell treatments' and interviews with clinicians who provide them, we examine the mechanisms by which medical legitimacy for these products is established and defended.

Citizens' use of digital media to connect with health care: Socio-ethical and regulatory implications.

Digital technologies promise to transform practices of health, medicine and health care and 'power' economies. In expectation of their presumed future benefits, governments in recent years have invested heavily in new technology initiatives and have sought to engender 'digital literacy' among citizens. This article introduces papers and expands on themes arising from a special issue that explores the socio-ethical and regulatory implications of citizens' use of digital media to connect with health care.

The shifting politics of patient activism: From bio-sociality to bio-digital citizenship.

Digital media provide novel tools for patient activists from disease- and condition-specific communities. While those with debilitating conditions or disabilities have long recognised the value of collective action for advancing their interests, digital media offer activists unparalleled opportunities to fulfil their goals. This article explores the shifting politics of 'activism' in the increasingly digitally mediated, commercialised context of healthcare, asking: what role have digital media played in the repertoire of activists' strategies? And, to what extent and how has the use of such media impacted the very concept of activism? Building on sociological ideas on emergent forms of 'biological citizenship' and drawing on findings from an analysis of available media, including television and print news reportage, online communications, published histories and campaign material and other information produced by activists in HIV/AIDS and breast cancer communities, we argue that digital media have profoundly shaped how 'activism' is enacted, both the goals pursued and the strategies adopted, which serve to broadly align contemporary patient communities' interests with those of science and business.

Altered VEGF Signaling Leads to Defects in Heart Tube Elongation and Omphalomesenteric Vein Fusion in Quail Embryos.

Formation of the endocardial and myocardial heart tubes involves precise cardiac progenitor sorting and tissue displacements from the primary heart field to the embryonic midline-a process that is dependent on proper formation of conjoining great vessels, including the omphalomesenteric veins (OVs) and dorsal aortae. Using a combination of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) over- and under-activation, fluorescence labeling of cardiac progenitors (endocardial and myocardial), and time-lapse imaging, we show that altering VEGF signaling results in previously unreported myocardial, in addition to vascular and endocardial phenotypes. Resultant data show: (1) exogenous VEGF leads to truncated endocardial and myocardial heart tubes and grossly dilated OVs; (2) decreased levels of VEGF receptor 2 tyrosine kinase signaling result in a severe abrogation of the endocardial tube, dorsal aortae, and OVs.

Feature issue introduction: Advanced Solid-State Lasers 2017.

The Advanced Solid State Lasers 2017 Conference (ASSL) was held from October 1 to 5, 2017. It was an extraordinary conference at the Nagoya Congress Center in Nagoya, Japan. ASSL 2017 again suggested an impressive platform where miscellaneous perceptions with a variety of approaches to optics, photonics, sensing, laser technology, laser systems, and solid state lasers were presented.

Recovery Within Injury Compensation Schemes: A System Mapping Study.

Purpose Many industrialised nations have systems of injury compensation and rehabilitation that are designed to support injury recovery and return to work. Despite their intention, there is now substantial evidence that injured people, employers and healthcare providers can experience those systems as difficult to navigate, and that this can affect injury recovery. This study sought to characterise the relationships and interactions occurring between actors in three Australian injury compensation systems, to identify the range of factors that impact on injury recovery, and the interactions and inter-relationships between these factors.

'No one here's helping me, what do you do?': addressing patient need for support and advice about stem cell treatments.

Aim: This article examines how those who contemplate purported stem cell treatments (SCTs) negotiate available information sources and the adequacy of current approaches to guidance and support.

Materials & Methods: Qualitative interviews undertaken with people who had contemplated or undergone purported SCTs for a range of conditions (n = 24 and n = 27, respectively), as well as professionals who are frequently asked about SCTs (n = 20) were analyzed.

Results: Our findings reveal the difficulties for individuals in discriminating between different sources of information on SCTs and the limitations of current responses.

Stuck in the middle: The emotional labours of case managers in the personal injury compensation system.

Background: Case managers within injury compensation systems are confronted with various emotional demands.

Objective: Employing the concept of emotional labour, this paper explores distinctive aspects of these demands.

Methods: The findings are drawn from focus groups with 21 Australian case managers.

Between hope and evidence: how community advisors demarcate the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate stem cell treatments.

Stem cell science provides an exemplary study of the 'management of hope'. On the one hand, raising 'hopes' and expectations is a seen as a necessary aspect of securing investment in promising innovative research. On the other, such hyperbole risks raising hopes to a level that may lead people to undertake undue risks, which may ultimately undermine confidence in medical research.