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The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has resulted in considerable consequences for many cancer patients, exacerbating pre-existing systemic health system limitations as well as creating new challenges. From socially distanced clinics and the widespread introduction of telehealth, to the halting of clinical trials and the reassessment of what constitutes "essential" treatment, care in oncology has abruptly changed. There is currently limited analysis of cancer patients' experiences of the pandemic and its impacts on illness, wellness, and everyday life. Through semi-structured interviews with 54 people living with cancer during the 2020 phase of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in Australia, we explore how patients experience illness and care in reflecting upon a range of pandemic challenges, including delay, distance, and vulnerability. We find that in some cases, these pandemic conditions redefined the meaning of essential cancer care, reconfigured expectations around clinical trials, constructed new affective distances, and amplified dread and fear for people living with cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An extensive body of scholarship focuses on cultural diversity in health care, and this has resulted in a plethora of strategies to "manage" cultural difference. This work has often been patient-oriented (i.e., focused on the differences of the person being cared for), rather than relational in character. In this study, we aimed to explore how the difference was relational and coproduced in the accounts of cancer care professionals and patients with cancer who were from migrant backgrounds. Drawing on eight focus groups with 57 cancer care professionals and one-on-one interviews with 43 cancer patients from migrant backgrounds, we explore social relations, including intrusion and feelings of discomfort, moral logics of rights and obligation, and the practice of defaulting to difference. We argue, on the basis of these accounts, for the importance of approaching difference as relational and that this could lead to a more reflexive means for overcoming "differences" in therapeutic settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Men are increasingly participating, and acknowledging their roles, as informal carers. Yet, there has been comparatively little exploration of their experiences therein, especially within the context of cancer care. Here, drawing on semi-structured qualitative interviews with 16 Australian male carers for a relative with cancer, and using constructivist grounded theory, we explore their experiences of informal caring. Our analysis highlights a series of tensions, including the following: the meanings and practicalities of care provision including notions of reciprocity, duty, autonomy, and interdependence; the discomforts of dependency and vulnerability; and the complicated moralities that inflect "caring well." Given the shifting dynamics around informal care, we argue for increased attention to the affective tensions that arise at the nexus of moralities and masculinities in informal caring relations, especially as they are articulated in the context of illness, affliction, and dependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social science scholarship on cancer has been almost exclusively focused on Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, despite a significant epidemiological transition taking place in many nonOECD contexts, with cancer emerging as a prominent, and strongly feared, illness experience. With cancer gaining an increasingly high profile in India, there is an urgent need to explore how experiences of cancer may be socially and culturally embedded, and in turn, how localized practices may shape the therapeutic encounter. Here, drawing on interviews with 40 people living with cancer in Hyderabad, India, we focus on some specific components of their therapeutic journeys, including diagnostic and prognostic disclosure, collective versus individual decision making, the dynamics of medical authority, and the reception of cancer within their social milieu. These participants' accounts provide insight into a range of cultural sensibilities around illness and care, and reinforce the importance of understanding the cultural inflections of communication, decisions, and illness experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiences of cancer are enmeshed with cultural understandings and social discourses around responsibility and causation. A cancer diagnosis can raise questions about its causation -- including the role of the individual -- whereas the disease and its treatment provide various social markers of illness. We present a sociological study of 81 women's accounts of living with cancer, with a focus on how women interpret their illness, in light of their interpersonal interactions and accounts of social relations. Our analysis reveals women's experiences of cancer diagnosis and treatment, the varied sociocultural meanings of cancer and the responses it elicits, the presence of moral assessments within everyday interactions, and the implications for the support and care they receive. We argue that the experience of cancer should be seen as intimately interwoven with its social reception and cultural sense-making practices, including normative constructs which promote ideas about (in)justice, responsibilization, and shame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transitions to palliative care can involve a shift in philosophy from life-prolonging to life-enhancing care. People living with a life-limiting illness will often receive palliative care through specialist outpatient clinics, while also being cared for by another medical specialty. Experiences of this point of care have been described as being liminal in character, that is, somewhere between living and dying. Drawing on experiences of illness and care taken from semistructured interviews with 30 palliative care outpatients in Australia, we found that this phase was frequently understood as concurrently living and dying. We suggest that this is a “parallax experience” involving narratives of a coherent linear self that is able to understand both realities, in a way that acknowledges the benefits of being multiple. These findings have significant implications for the ways in which palliative care is understood and how the self and subjectivity might be conceptualized at the end of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence-based medicine has enhanced the predictive capacity of biomedicine in population terms, but it has also introduced new challenges for patient care and biomedical expertise. In this article we examine the negotiation of prediction and indeterminacy by oncology clinicians, exploring the ways in which they report delivering prognosis and engaging with indeterminacy in conversation with their patients. We examine oncologists' strategies for delivering "news," the technological mediation of uncertainty, and reported conversational turns toward a focus on indeterminacy and individual response. Drawing from these accounts, we argue that, although predictive capacity remains central to oncological expertise, notions of individualism, subjectivity, and self-determination are being heavily drawn on by clinicians. Rather than presenting a challenge, such ideas might be becoming increasingly central to oncological expertise. Interviews with cancer nurses illustrate their precarious relationship with evidence, uncovering tensions in their approach to patients and in their attempts to traverse diverse paradigms of care. We argue for an understanding of oncological expertise as evolving within the context of potentially competing contemporary cultural shifts, and against a simplistic notion of indeterminacy as necessarily eroding expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cancer patients are now combining complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) with biomedical cancer treatments, reflecting an increasingly pluralistic health care environment. However, there has been little research done on the ways in which cancer patients juggle multiplicity in claims to expertise, models of disease, and therapeutic practice. Drawing on the accounts of cancer patients who use CAM, in this article I develop a conceptualization of therapeutic decision making, utilizing the notion of bricolage as a key point of departure. The patient accounts illustrate the "piecing together" (or bricolage) of therapeutic trajectories, thawing on intuitive, embodied knowledge, as well as formalized "objective" scientific expertise. Le bricoleur, as characterized here, actively mediates, rather than accepts or rejects CAM or biomedicine, and utilizes a combination of scientific expertise, embodied physicality, and social knowledge to make decisions and assess therapeutic effectiveness. Although these "border crossings" are potentially subversive of established biomedical expertise, the analysis also illustrates the structural constraints (and penalties) associated with bricolage, and furthermore, the interplay of a repositioning of responsibility with neoliberal forms of self-governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, research on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use by cancer patients has tended to provide a "snapshot" of experience, with little attention given to the evolution of experience over time. Drawing on data from solicited diaries, this article examines individual cancer patients' temporal experiences of CAM. Our findings suggest that experiences of CAM are variable over time and space, and furthermore, that the everyday act of "doing CAM" is considerably more problematic than is often reported in face-to-face interview or survey studies. This is explored in relation to the tension between the perceived need for restrictive self-discipline alongside a sense of the emancipatory potential of CAM; the role of CAM therapists in reconceptualizing disease; and the complex interplay between CAM-derived notions of self-healing and acceptance of individual mortality. We argue that an emphasis on the temporality of cancer patients' CAM engagement is necessary to access a more nuanced understanding of the lived experiences of cancer patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in Pakistan. There is increasing evidence that patients are using a range of (biomedical and nonbiomedical) therapeutic options for cancer treatment. To date there has been no sociologically informed research into the engagement of cancer patients in Pakistan with available modalities. In this article, the authors present findings from the first such study. They purposively sampled 46 cancer patients from four hospitals in Lahore and conducted semistructured interviews with them. They argue that individuals are actively mediating therapeutic possibilities by drawing on, and at times being constrained by, personal, social, and cultural resources. It is the authors' contention that this can be conceptualized by an appreciation of individuals' active engagement with three temporally and spatially specific dimensions: structural and practical constraint; pragmatic experimentation; and cultural and religious affiliation. The negotiation (and varying power) of these dimensions is crucial to the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current study, the author explores the complex effects and contradictory roles of the Internet as a source of empowerment and control, and as a site of "risk management." Drawing on a study of the Internet usage of Australian men with prostate cancer, the author investigates how access to information and online support affects men's experiences of disease and, in particular, the possible implications of Internet-informed patients for the doctor-patient relationship. The data reveal that accessing information and/or support online can have a profound effect on men's experiences of prostate cancer, providing a method of taking some control over their disease and limiting inhibitions experienced in face-to- face encounters. However, it is also clear that some medical specialists view Internet-informed patients as a challenge to their power within medical encounters and, as a result, employ disciplinary strategies that reinforce traditional patient roles and alienate patients who use the Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]