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This article explores men's experiences of and management strategies for urinary incontinence (UI) following treatment for prostate cancer. Qualitative interviews with 29 men, recruited from two prostate cancer support groups, explored their post-treatment experiences. Drawing on a conceptual toolkit connecting theories of masculinities, embodiment, and chronic illness, this paper identifies older men's experiences and strategies for managing UI and explores how these are shaped by their masculinities. This article identifies interdependence between managing stigma for UI and maintaining masculinity. Men's embodied practices for engaging in activities in public, crucial to masculine identity, were disrupted. In response, they adopted new reflexive body techniques to manage and resolve their UI, and thereby address the threat to their masculine identities, characterised in three strategies: monitoring, planning, and disciplining. The new embodied practices men described suggest three factors as important components for adopting new reflexive body techniques: routine, desire, and unruliness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research presents the results of a study about people with failed metal-on-metal hip implants, and draws on the STS concept of the technological imperative alongside research on the value of patient knowledge in clinical settings and the legitimacy of embodied stories. Popularly understood as positive and life changing, hip replacement surgery was hailed as 'the operation of the century', until a series of widespread failures of hundreds of thousands of hip implants, known collectively as metal-on-metal (MoM) hips, drew attention to the poor regulation of medical implants. This paper argues that poor regulation intersects with narratives of patients' pain, which are obstructed by surgeons and the UK regulatory body, with the effect of denying both patients' embodied experiences of implant failure, and their restitution to good health. Patient narratives about problems with their hip implant are the wellspring from which scientific evidence emerges which can indicate widespread implant failure. By obstructing these narratives the regulatory system undermines the very evidence it needs to operate effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevalence of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) diagnoses and medication use has increased over time around the world, but significant regional differences remain. This paper aims to determine and explain disparities in ADHD prevalence and medication use among school-aged children in two distinct school systems, in Flanders (Belgium) and Québec (Canada). We present detailed descriptive and comparative analyses of data from 35 schools, 114 teachers, and 1046 parents (children) that were collected as part of a comparative international project. The data concern teacher and parent suspicions, teachers' ratings of ADHD-related behaviors in children, teachers' views of medication use, and teachers' beliefs about ADHD. The results show that, compared with Flanders, Québec had significantly more children diagnosed with ADHD and more frequent suspicions of ADHD in children by teachers and parents. We refer to the conceptual, institutional, and interactional levels of medicalization to interpret our findings and conclude that social and cultural readings of children's behaviors differ greatly between regions. Medicalization of children's behaviors is more common in Québec than in Flanders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citing their students' low levels of empathy, medical educators have scrambled to implement curricula with the hopes of buffering against the corrosive effects of biomedical and clinical experiences in medical school. The assumption undergirding these studies by social scientists and medical educators alike is that immersion in biomedical education and clinical experience erodes students' empathic capacities, and that exposure to humanities and social sciences content will amend these losses. But we do not know if this assumption is correct. In this project, we empirically assess this assumption by utilizing a unique data set constructed from student applicant and survey data from the American Medical College Application Service (AMCAS) and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). We test whether medical school students (N = 8255) from the United States (U.S.) with different academic backgrounds represented by their college major have different levels of empathy, net of demographic control variables. We report two findings. First, we find that students who majored in humanities or interpretive social sciences disciplines have higher empathy scores than their peers who majored in the positivistic social sciences and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines. Second, we find that the relationship between empathy and time in medical school is more nuanced than we would expect from the existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrative medicine – complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practised in mainstream healthcare organizations – combines medical treatments based on incommensurable paradigms. As the Internet has been portrayed as a crucial pathway to CAM and sites administered by reputable organizations are considered to be relatively reliable sources of medical information, the research sought to explore and compare the ways in which CAM is presented on the Internet websites of diverse medical institutions. The contents of the websites of the Ministry of Health, the Israeli Medical Association and Israeli healthcare organizations were analysed, using an interdisciplinary theory of network gatekeeping. The websites were analysed not only according to the degree to which they are considered to be informative, but also with regard to the perceptions of integration that they convey. Comparison of the websites of community healthcare organizations and hospitals indicates that while the former display CAM treatments as an attractive commodity, the latter convey a message stressing the need to subject CAM to bio-medical scrutiny. Little or no information was provided concerning a number of important issues, such as research findings about efficacy and safety, risks and ethical considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]