The many faces of medical treatment imperatives: Biopower and the cultural authority of medicine in late-life treatment decisions in the United States.

Despite changes in specific features of the US health-care system and policy environment in the past 50 years, professional dominance of medicine remains consistent. Extant social science research has considered how the cultural authority of medicine manifests and persists, sometimes emphasizing institutional structural influences and other times focusing on how individuals' agentic behaviour shapes their decisions and strategies regarding the consumption of health-care. We build on and extend these literatures using qualitative in-depth interview data to explore a typology of ways palliative care patients and their caregivers experience medical treatment imperatives across a range of social contexts.

Integrating fundamental cause theory and Bourdieu to explain pathways between socioeconomic status and health: the case of health insurance denials for genetic testing.

Fundamental cause theory (FCT) is among the most widely recognised and accepted social science frameworks used to examine the processes driving health inequalities. Despite the wide influence of the theory, it remains largely underutilised in practical and applied research on health disparities. This paper proposes that Pierre Bourdieu's theories of capital and symbolic power can be integrated with FCT to address limitations in the latter theory, making it more useful in health disparities research.

Does Palliative Care Utilization Facilitate Conversion to Hospice Care? A Qualitative Study of the "Soft No".

Background: Facilitating patient conversion to hospice at end of life is a prominent clinical concern. Enrollment in outpatient palliative care services is often assumed to encourage seamless transition to hospice care, but this has not been demonstrated. Moreover, decisions to convert from palliative care to hospice are generally treated as dichotomous, thus hampering our ability to understand decision processes.

Political economy of hope as a cultural facet of biomedicalization: A qualitative examination of constraints to hospice utilization among U.S. end-stage cancer patients.

A growing body of social science literature is devoted to describing processes of biomedicalization. The issue of biomedicalization is especially relevant for individuals suffering from end-stage cancer and hoping that aggressive end-of-life interventions, which are riddled with uncertainty around quantity or quality of life, will produce a 'cure'. To examine hospice underutilization among end-stage cancer patients, we apply the anthropological concept 'political economy of hope,' which describes how personal and collective 'hope' is associated with the political and economic structures that produce biomedicalization processes.