Digital health technologies transform practices, roles, and relationships in medicine. New possibilities for a ubiquitous and constant data collection and the processing of data in real-time enable more personalized health services. These technologies might also allow users to actively participate in health practices, thus potentially changing the role of patients from passive receivers of healthcare to active agents. The crucial driving force of this transformation is the implementation of data-intensive surveillance and monitoring as well as self-monitoring technologies. Some commentators use terms like revolution, democratization, and empowerment to describe the aforementioned transformation process in medicine. The public debate as well as most of the ethical discourse on digital health tends to focus on the technologies themselves, mostly ignoring the economic framework of their design and implementation. Analyzing the transformation process connected to digital health technologies needs an epistemic lens that also considers said economic framework, which I argue is surveillance capitalism. This paper introduces the concept of liquid health as such an epistemic lens. Liquid health is based on Zygmunt Bauman's framing of modernity as a process of liquefaction that dissolves traditional norms and standards, roles, and relations. By using liquid health as an epistemic lens, I aim to show how digital health technologies reshape concepts of health and illness, change the scope of the medical domain, and liquify roles and relationships that surround health and healthcare. The basic hypothesis is that although digital health technologies can lead to personalization of treatment and empowerment of users, their economic framework of surveillance capitalism may undermine these very goals. Using liquid health as a concept allows us to better understand and describe practices of health and healthcare that are shaped by digital technologies and the specific economic practices they are inseparably attached to.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.115810 | DOI Listing |
Am Soc Clin Oncol Educ Book
January 2025
Division of Oncology, Department of Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
The growing sophistication of tumor molecular profiling has helped to slowly transition oncologic care toward a more personalized approach in different tumor types, including in bladder cancer. The National Comprehensive Cancer Network recommends that all patients with stage IVA and stage IVB urothelial carcinoma have molecular analysis that integrates at least testing to help facilitate the selection of future therapeutic options. Sequencing of tumor-derived tissue is the mainstay to obtain this genomic testing, but as in other cancers, there has been extensive research into the integration of liquid biopsies in longitudinal management.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPLoS One
January 2025
Department of Nutrition, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, United States of America.
Aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) is a class 1 carcinogen and mycotoxin known to contribute to the development of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), growth impairment, altered immune system modulation, and malnutrition. AFB1 is synthesized by Aspergillus flavus and is known to widely contaminate foodstuffs, particularly maize, wheat, and groundnuts. The mechanism in which AFB1 causes genetic mutations has been well studied, however its metabolomic effects remained largely unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Nat Prod
January 2025
Marbio, Norwegian College of Fishery Science (NFH), Faculty of Biosciences, Fisheries, and Economics, UiT-The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø 9037, Norway.
Neurosurg Rev
January 2025
Department of Critical Care Medicine, The Affiliated Taizhou People's Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Zhou shan hui shui Community,199 Hailing South Road, Taizhou, Jiangsu Province, 225300, China.
Traumatic brain injury (TBI)-associated neuroinflammation and neurotoxicity can induce gastrointestinal dysfunction through the brain-gut axis. Partially hydrolyzed guar gum (PHGG) was demonstrated to exert beneficial health effects by altering gut microbiota and short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) production. Our study aimed to explore the effects of PHGG on gastrointestinal dysfunction in TBI mouse models.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnal Chem
January 2025
Department of Food Science and Nutrition, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong 999077, China.
Sample pretreatment for mass spectrometry (MS)-based metabolomics and lipidomics is normally conducted independently with two sample aliquots and separate matrix cleanup procedures, making the two-step process sample-intensive and time-consuming. Herein, we introduce a high-throughput pretreatment workflow for integrated nontargeted metabolomics and lipidomics leveraging the enhanced matrix removal (EMR)-lipid microelution 96-well plates. The EMR-lipid technique was innovatively employed to effectively separate and isolate non-lipid small metabolites and lipids in sequence using significantly reduced sample amounts and organic solvents.
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