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In this paper we propose a new category of International Medical Graduates (IMGs) who are forced to leave their home countries: "refugee physicians." In US social science scholarship, IMGs are divided into US citizen IMG (USIMG) and non-US citizen IMG (non-USIMG). For purposes of US medical licensure qualifications and recordkeeping, US- and non-USIMGs are lumped together. These categorizations are too blunt to demonstrate important differences among non-USIMGs. The category of "refugee physicians" distinguishes non-USIMGs who are forced to flee their homelands from other IMGs. We define and develop this category based on qualitative in-depth interviews conducted in 2019 with 28 non-USIMGs who fled to the US within the past 15 years. Using narrative analysis, we constructed "flight biographies," storied chronological events and experiences, for each physician. The flight biographies highlight the medical and political contexts in which they were forced to flee and are situated in the US. Two representative cases demonstrate how and why lumping refugee physicians together with other IMGs obscures the constraints and challenges that set them apart from the other IMG categories. First, the term refugee physician focuses attention on how physicians are located among forcibly displaced people worldwide, including their distinct relationships to their home countries, transit countries in which some of them seek sanctuary, and the US, where some requested asylum and others have been resettled. Second, because refugee is an umbrella term that blends categories of law, policy, social science, and everyday usage it encompasses a wide variety of lived experiences along a continuum of compulsion to leave. Finally, refugee physician illuminates the group's distinct relationship to medical licensure and brings into focus structural barriers that impede their goal of gaining a US medical license., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

US hospitals have developed a variety of strategies to meet federal requirements and provide culturally and linguistically appropriate health care for people who report limited English proficiency. A key strategy is the use of healthcare interpreters who may be physically present in the room or in the room via telephone or video conference. This paper analyzes the contingent and unstable combinations of heterogeneous human and nonhuman elements that form and disperse during visits to the hospital when healthcare interpreters are used. It draws its analysis from 9 months of fieldwork in 2012 that included following 69 adult immigrant and refugee patients in one hospital in Maine and observing encounters with interpreters and clinic staff. It introduces the concept of interpreter assemblage to make sense of the transnational mixes of people, technologies, and ideas that bring multilingual hospital care to life and give it a character of its own., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Medicalization studies have changed dramatically in the past decade in part due to the increased attention to the role of pharmaceuticals and the pharmaceutical industry in modern life. This review paper explores the relationship between the concepts of medicalization and the newly developed terms of pharmaceuticalization and the pharmaceuticalization of public health. We show how and why modernist thinking limits the terms' utility to explain a world in which both modern and postmodern objects and people interact with each other. We provide a framework for reconceptualizing and empirically studying these key processes of the 21st century., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

This study discusses several aspects of health care utilization and health care practices for a group of Tai Dam refugee women who today are living in central Iowa. Several important variables examined in this discussion include: ideas about illness etiology, choice and use of health care providers, birth control practices, and the use of preventive health care in the form of prenatal health care visits. Salient findings include: Tai Dam belief that the majority of illnesses are caused by temperature and weather changes or bad food and water, or that illnesses are caused by the supernatural. Two-thirds of the women do not use and have never used any form of birth control. Although the average Tai Dam woman had been living in the U.S. for seven years at the time of the study, communications with physicians and understanding of written medicine instructions is difficult for many due to language problems. One-quarter of the women are not covered by medical insurance of any kind.

This paper examines the intellectual roots of the medicalization of menopause in the 1930s and 1940s. An analysis of published papers written by prominent American medical specialists reveals three models that were developed to understand menopause--biological, psychological and environmental--and shows how each contributed to its medicalization. This transformation was made possible by the paradigm of sex endocrinology and the availability of a new drug (DES), which was produced in 1938. Exploring the medicalization of menopause illuminates some of the special and complicated ways that women's experiences are vulnerable to medical control.