Structural and Psychosocial Challenges Among Underserved Patients Receiving Hemodialysis During and Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Qualitative Study.

Rationale & Objective: Racial and ethnic minority groups in the United States are disproportionately affected by chronic kidney disease and progressive kidney failure and face significantly more socioeconomic and psychosocial challenges. However, how such patients' social environment and stigmatization shape their illness experiences and abilities to cope before and during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has not been well documented, even as social scientific research predicts these groups' exponential vulnerability.

Study Design: Qualitative study using semistructured interviews to elicit individual patient narratives about their personal illness experiences before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, any challenges they faced, and their sources of support.

Patients' Perspectives on Race and the Use of Race-Based Algorithms in Clinical Decision-Making: a Qualitative Study.

Background: Clinical algorithms that incorporate race as a modifying factor to guide clinical decision-making have recently been criticized for propagating racial bias in medicine. Equations used to calculate lung or kidney function are examples of clinical algorithms that have different diagnostic parameters depending on an individual's race. While these clinical measures have multiple implications for clinical care, patients' awareness of and their perspectives on the application of such algorithms are unknown.

Beyond the clinic? Eluding a medical diagnosis of anorexia through narrative.

The persistence and recurrence of anorexia nervosa poses a clinical challenge, and provides support for critiques of oppressive and injurious facets of society inscribed on women's bodies. This essay illustrates how a phenomenological, linguistic anthropological approach fruitfully traverses clinical and cultural perspectives by directing attention beyond the embodied experience of patients diagnosed with anorexia nervosa to those who are not clinically diagnosed. Extending a model of illness and recovery as entailing sufferers' emplotting of past, present, and imagined future selves, I argue that women's accounts of their experiences do not simply reflect lived reality, but actually propel health-relevant states of being by enlivening and creating these realities in the process of their telling.