What is the effect of self-identified HIV activism in willingness to participate in HIV cure-related clinical trials? Results from the ANRS-APSEC study.

Objectives: Enrolling people living with HIV with undetectable viral load into HIV cure-related clinical trials (HCRCT) is challenging. Few data are currently available about the individual factors that influence willingness to participate in HCRCT (WPHCRCT). We hypothesised that WPHCRCT would be more frequent among people living with HIV considering themselves HIV activists.

From solidarity to autonomy: towards a redefinition of the parameters of the notion of autonomy.

Starting from examples of concrete situations in France, I show that autonomy and solidarity can coexist only if the parameters of autonomy are redefined. I show on the one hand that in situations where autonomy is encouraged, solidarity nevertheless remains at the foundation of their practices. On the other hand, in situations largely infused with family solidarity, the individual autonomy may be put in danger.

[IS PATIENT INFORMATION AN ILLUSION?].

Although the idea is widespread today in the medical community that patients are fully informed, since this is now guaranteed by law, we should ask whether this information is always provided, and indeed truly encouraged. To answer this question, the reflection is based on data collected during two anthropological research projects, one on the information provided to people with serious diseases in the hospital environment and the other on information relating to medicines in the context of self-medication. This research reveals that the obligation to inform to which health professionals are bound is thwarted by the reality of information on the ground--which arises from cultural and social mechanisms--and that, despite declarations of faith in patient education, health information provision remains limited.

Anthropology, ethical dissonance, and the construction of the object.

In this article, I discuss certain questions relating to the ethical difficulties faced by anthropologists when dealing with two different social groups and when one group holds a position of dominance over the other. In the first example, I draw on my work on doctor-patient relationships in France; in the second, on a study on reproduction in immigrant African families from Mali and Senegal, living in polygynous households in France. I use these examples to explore questions of positionality, beneficence, and potential harm.

Managing medicinal risks in self-medication.

Background: The practice of self-medication is exemplary in raising the question of medicinal uses and risks. In contrast to the biomedical or pharmacological view of self-medication, the anthropological approach looks to understand the logics that underpin it.

Objective: Therefore, I wished to question how users choose the medicines they take and how they construct the modalities of their use.

The other side of medicalization: self-medicalization and self-medication.

The concept of medicalization has given rise to considerable discussion in the social sciences, focusing especially on the extension of medicine's jurisdiction and its hold over our bodies through the reduction of social phenomena to individual biological pathologies. However, the process leading to medical treatment may start when individuals engage in self-medication and thus practice "self-medicalization." But, can we apply to this concept the same type of analysis as the first and see merely the individual's replication of the social control mechanisms to which he/she usually falls victim? This article aims to demonstrate that the medicalization individuals practice on themselves takes on a completely different meaning to that practiced by the medical profession.

Discourse on safe drug use: symbolic logics and ethical aspects.

Drug safety is not a matter for healthcare professionals alone. Patients are also involved, at three different levels: (i) in the behaviours patients adopt to reduce the adverse effects of the drugs; (ii) in regard to what some doctors say to their patients about drug risks; and (iii) in what the pharmaceutical industry says about self-medication and risks. This article will examine these aspects on the basis of information gathered in France during anthropological studies on drug use.

Religious attitudes toward prescriptions, medicines, and doctors in France.

Although the social sciences have studied the influence of social environment on individual behaviors regarding medication, very little research has been done on the variations that exist between patients in equivalent social contexts but with diverse religious backgrounds. This article presents the results of research on the correlation between patients' religious-cultural background (Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or Muslim) and their behaviors regarding medication. It shows that the cultural origin as well as the collective history of the groups to which patients belong impacts their attitudes toward prescriptions, medicines, their own bodies, and doctors.

Lying, secrecy and power within the doctor-patient relationship.

Based on ethnographic research from two distinct French settings, the author examines the lying of doctors, and the lying of patients. The first situation is that of medical practitioners, specialists in the treatment of alcoholism, who affirm to ex-drinkers that it is impossible to drink normally again after treatment, without falling back into dependency, whilst knowing of the existence of contradictory cases. The second situation is that in which a certain number of patients find themselves, and who lead their doctors to believe that they have been taking their medication and dissimulate their real behaviour, that of non-observance of prescription.