European Health Data Space-An Opportunity Now to Grasp the Future of Data-Driven Healthcare.

The May 2022 proposal from the European commission for a 'European health data space' envisages advantages for health from exploiting the growing mass of health data in Europe. However, key stakeholders have identified aspects that demand clarification to ensure success. Data will need to be freed from traditional silos to flow more easily and to cross artificial borders.

Exceptional patients and communication in cancer care-are we missing another survival factor?

Objective: There is increased awareness of the issue of exceptional survival beyond expectations among cancer patients with poor prognosis, and researchers are starting to look closely at this phenomenon. In this study, we explored the perceptions of these "exceptional patients" as to their understanding and insight into their unusual experience.

Methods: We used a qualitative approach consisting of in-depth, open-ended interviews with exceptional patients in two locations, Texas and Israel, from 2007 to 2014.

Living outliers: experiences, insights and narratives of exceptional survivors of incurable cancer.

Aim: Unexplained prolonged survival given a diagnosis of incurable advanced cancer is a puzzling phenomenon that recently has attracted more scientific research. The purpose of this study was to add to the understanding of how exceptional patients perceive and explain their unusual experience.

Methods: We recruited patients for interviews from a population registry, patients with advanced lung or pancreatic malignancy who experienced exceptional survival.

Biomedicine inside out: an ethnography of brain surgery.

The article discusses patient objectification from the viewpoint of the objectifying, rather than the objectified party. Resisting a dichotomy between physician-objectifying and ethnographer-humanising, the author portrays objectification not as an essential by-product of professional tendencies, epistemological bases, practical necessities and processes of socialisation but as highly dependent upon context. A further look is given to the settings within which the discursive dynamics of 'objectivity' and 'experience' come about through artefacts, space, symbols, bodily appearances and so on.

Experts and 'knowledge that counts': a study into the world of brain cancer diagnosis.

This paper provides a close, in situ look into the life of a neuro-oncology (brain cancer) clinic of a large hospital in Israel, based on a six-month participant observation. It points to the many challenges involved in the solidification of brain tumour diagnoses by different experts, and presents these epistemological and practical complexities as they uncover in daily routine. The paper's task is two-fold: first, to underline the technological and epistemological grounds of 'expertise' in the medicoscientific practice of diagnosis, and their roles in the assertion of expert authoritativeness; and second, to provide analytical tools to approach the complexity of diagnostic processes, the potential frictions it may create, and the related mechanisms of resolution.

Boundary at work: alternative medicine in biomedical settings.

The study explores the process of boundary demarcation within hospital settings by examining a new phenomenon in modern medicine: collaboration between alternative and biomedical practitioners (primarily physicians) working together in biomedical settings. The study uses qualitative methods to examine the nature of this collaboration by calling attention to the ways in which the biomedical profession manages to secure its boundaries and to protect its hard-core professional knowledge. It identifies the processes of exclusion and marginalization as the main mechanisms by which symbolic boundaries are marked daily in the professional field.