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 structural vulnerabilities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe stage is set for a new era of precariousness in modern medicine, driven by the increasing failure of a key pharmaceutical pillar-antimicrobials. In the context of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), the rise of antimicrobial resistance is introducing urgent questions around what might constitute "best practice" in a rapidly evolving scene, including the value of asymptomatic screening (test and treat), and the consequent downstream collateral damage emerging from over-use of our diminishingly effective antimicrobial resources. Drawing on interviews with clinicians, experts, and industry representatives, we examine resistance as a site of emerging and co-constitutive moral, temporal, and economic dilemmas.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFrom 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 illnesses, including fatigue syndromes, auto-immune diseases, and neurological conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn 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 infections (STIs). We aimed to identify tensions and important considerations in the sampling and recruitment of LGBTQ+ populations in health and social science research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSociol Health Illn
November 2024
Young adults living with chronic illness often experience considerable uncertainty across the emotional, cultural and medical spheres of their everyday lives. The process of seeking, receiving and reckoning with a diagnosis has frequently been an in-road for qualitative examinations of these experiences. As a result, the biomedical diagnosis has often taken centre stage in research concerning how uncertainty is managed and/or more stability is found.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe 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 valuable and/or worthwhile within the organizational ecology of the hospital.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn 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 industry representatives, we unpack these stakeholders' accounts of STI treatment cultures, drawing out the importance of socio-historical (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Over the past decade, the pharmacy sector's policy, academic and professional spheres have increasingly drawn attention to the opportunities to better leverage the untapped potential of the community pharmacy sector in contributing to global efforts to reduce antimicrobial resistance (AMR). While efforts are in train, progress is slow.
Objective: To draw insights from global experts in the field to identify a broad range of potential future policy directions to support community pharmacists' involvement in antimicrobial stewardship (AMS).
Sociol Health Illn
September 2024
Although a diagnosis of a life-limiting cancer is likely to evoke emotions, such as fear, panic and anxiety, for some people it can also provide an opportunity to live life differently. This article is based on research undertaken in Aotearoa New Zealand on the topic of exceptional cancer trajectories. Eighty-one participants who had been identified as living with a cancer diagnosis longer than clinically expected were interviewed, along with 25 people identified by some of the participants as supporters in their journey.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: To examine how regulatory structures and processes focused on antimicrobial stewardship and antimicrobial resistance are experienced by hospital managers and clinicians.
Methods: Forty-two hospital managers and clinicians working within accreditation and antimicrobial stewardship teams in three Australian hospitals participated in individual in-depth interviews. Thematic analysis was performed.
Background: Diagnostic testing has been proposed as a key strategy to tackle escalating antimicrobial resistance (AMR). However, effectiveness of testing is limited by the complexities of the hospital environment, including human factors.
Objectives: To examine swab-testing in diabetes-related foot infections as a case study of the factors impacting microbiology testing use, efficacy, and antimicrobial resistance.
Recent studies have reported several beneficial effects of natural compounds on cancerous cells, highlighting their use for future treatments. These preliminary findings have encouraged experiments with natural substances, such as plant extracts, to examine both cytotoxic and mitogenic effects and find alternative treatments for diseases such as breast cancer. This study examines the effects of microwave-assisted and ethanol maceration of marjoram () on MCF-7 breast cancer cell lines and normal breast tissue cell lines used as controls.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Anthracycline-induced cardiotoxicity has a variable incidence, and the development of left ventricular dysfunction is preceded by elevations in cardiac troponin concentrations. Beta-adrenergic receptor blocker and renin-angiotensin system inhibitor therapies have been associated with modest cardioprotective effects in unselected patients receiving anthracycline chemotherapy.
Methods: In a multicenter, prospective, randomized, open-label, blinded end-point trial, patients with breast cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma receiving anthracycline chemotherapy underwent serial high-sensitivity cardiac troponin testing and cardiac magnetic resonance imaging before and 6 months after anthracycline treatment.
Background: Paediatric precision oncology aims to match therapeutic agents to driver gene targets. We investigated whether parents and patients regret participation in precision medicine trials, particularly when their hopes are unfulfilled.
Methods: Parents and adolescent patients completed questionnaires at trial enrolment (T0) and after receiving results (T1).
Objectives: Recent years have witnessed the rise of patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) in palliative care (PC), particularly those focused on the standardized measurement of symptom burden. These measures seek to evaluate the quality of PC through the quantification of various aspects of potential suffering (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground Community pharmacist involvement in antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) within primary care is underutilised. Despite this view being consistently held across the pharmacy sector's policy, academic and professional spheres, there is limited understanding of how this positioning aligns with consumers' perceptions and expectations. Objective To explore participants' experience using antibiotics and their engagement with pharmacists to support their use.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The approval of Bruton tyrosine kinase (BTK) inhibitors in patients with previously untreated chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) was based on trials which compared ibrutinib with alkylating agents in patients considered unfit for fludarabine, cyclophosphamide, and rituximab, the most effective chemoimmunotherapy in CLL. We aimed to assess whether ibrutinib and rituximab is superior to fludarabine, cyclophosphamide, and rituximab in terms of progression-free survival.
Methods: This study is an interim analysis of FLAIR, which is an open-label, randomised, controlled, phase 3 trial in patients with previously untreated CLL done at 101 UK National Health Service hospitals.
For three years, COVID-19 has circulated among our communities and around the world, fundamentally changing social interactions, health care systems, and service delivery. For people living with (and receiving treatment for) cancer, pandemic conditions presented significant additional hurdles in an already unstable and shifting environment, including disrupted personal contact with care providers, interrupted access to clinical trials, distanced therapeutic encounters, multiple immune vulnerabilities, and new forms of financial precarity. In a 2020 perspective in this journal, we examined how COVID-19 was reshaping cancer care in the early stages of the pandemic and how these changes might endure into the future.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Community pharmacists, as primary care providers, are an underutilised resource in antimicrobial stewardship (AMS). Primary care plays an important role in tackling antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as the principle of balancing access to antimicrobials while ensuring optimal use is agnostic to health setting. Understanding the sector's perceptions and practices towards AMS involvement is a continuing focus area of research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrecision oncology holds an increasingly powerful social function. In the era of precision, how people encounter, live with, and experience cancer, how they imagine their lives, how they navigate treatment regimens, and experience side effects, have been radically transformed. Innovations in oncology - in this case precision-related - are always more-than-clinical; their circulation exceeds the laboratory and the hospital, but what this 'circulation of innovation' produces has been thus far opaque.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMen's emotions in intimate partner relationships have received little research attention. The current interpretive descriptive study included 30 Canadian-based men to address the research question: What are the connections between masculinities and men's emotions in and after intimate partner relationships? Three inductively derived themes included emergent distressing emotions wherein participants' predominance for holding in abeyance their concerns about the relationship manifested varying levels of emotional stoicism. Within this context most men denied or downplayed and did not express their emotions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Pharmacists play a key role in tackling the global public health threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) through contributing to antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) practices. Professional pharmacy organisations describe this AMS role in position statements. Understanding how this role is described, including the why and potential impact is a first step to understanding how this issue is described to the profession, and framed in advocacy.
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