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The article focuses on the challenges faced by scholarly journals, particularly the financial and academic unsustainability of the current publishing system, leading to the mass resignation of the Editorial Board of Critical Public Health. Topics discussed include the impact of rising costs, overproduction of research papers, and the need for new models of publishing to address the crisis in academic publishing.

Patient-centred care requires patients to be active participants in decision-making in consultations. Decision-making participation requires patients to understand their condition and to be able to convey their health literacy to medical specialists they encounter. Based on conversation analysis of 18 audio-recorded consultations between cancer patients and a range of cancer care specialists, this article analyses the ways cancer specialists attempt to ascertain their patient's understanding of their disease. Cancer specialists routinely enquire about their patient's understanding. In doing so, they phrase enquiries in different ways, resulting in different patient responses. How questions are phrased can require patients to deal with contradictory norms in the consultation, such as the patient being competent but not assuming medical expertise, and potentially hinder patient participation. Alternatively, questions can allow patients to draw on their own experience and so facilitate greater patient involvement. Questions aimed directly at the patient's medical understanding result in minimal or negative responses. In contrast, questions directed at what the patient has been told or has experienced, elicit longer and more in-depth responses from the patient. This analysis illuminates the co-construction of cancer specialist consultations and suggests simple ways in which patient involvement in the consultation can be facilitated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relation of mass media and public reactions to adverse drug reactions (ADR) to the medication Eltroxin (levothyroxine) in New Zealand from June 2008 to August 2009. Topics include statements by New Zealand government agencies related to public health, the importation of alternative drugs to treat hypothyroidism, and reforms related to drug safety and reporting.

An editorial is presented on vaccines, policies, and the role of public health. Topics include McCoy's report on the characteristics of Americans who may be opposed to vaccination which explains respondent's views regarding vaccines' safety and unimportance of compulsory vaccinations; and concerns of public about vaccines portrayal in public and social media.

This article explores processes of legitimising health knowledge in three different spaces: the clinic, the home and the multidisciplinary meeting. It considers the ways in which categorisation work, health understandings and therapeutic actions are intertwined. The analysis draws on ethnomethodology and actor-network theory to suggest that in the clinic consultation room, a number of interactional elements in talk about side effects and talk about unorthodox interventions attempt to stabilise the categories used by health experts. In contrast, the household is a centre of knowledge production that may subvert, manipulate or align with expert systems. Fixed and stable expert knowledge becomes flexible and hybridised inside the home. In the multidisciplinary team meeting different forms of authority are called upon in hospital-based cancer care meetings, where health professionals mix scientific understandings with other ways of knowing in determining treatment options. From these empirical observations it is argued that therapeutic actions are not subject in any simplistic way to a dominant mode of understanding, but there are many means of understanding that selectively come into play in relation to the specifics of the interaction that is occurring between patients, health professionals and therapeutic spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2007, a new formulation of Eltroxin, a medicine used to treat hypothyroidism, was introduced into New Zealand. By the end of September 2008, there were just over 800 reports linking the new formulation to a range of adverse reactions: joint and muscle pain, weight gain and depression, conjunctivitis, skin rash, and visual disturbances. In response to the prevalence of reports of adverse reactions, an alternative medication, Goldshield, was approved and offered to the public at a subsidised rate. This was despite assurances that the new Eltroxin formulation was safe for use: Medsafe, the government agency responsible for regulating therapeutic products in New Zealand, and an independent medicines monitoring group, stated there was no medical or physiological basis for the supposed adverse reactions. Using media coverage, agency press releases, and meeting minutes of the agencies involved, the paper employs an Actor-Network Theory-based (ANT) approach to understand how the controversy arose, how it took the form it did, and how it was ultimately settled. We explored how, during the controversy, actors emerged, delineated themselves, and concurrently prompted other actors to do the same, as they defined and debated the nature of the risk of Eltroxin. By using an ANT approach, it is possible to illustrate how various actors, including the lay-public, collectively shape the activities of apparatuses that regulate and provide medicines. Thus, we believe such an analysis demonstrates the importance of using public controversies about health risk as an analytical focal point for understanding how various forces shape contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2008 New Zealand Carers' Strategy recognises the role that "young carers" play in supporting family members who are ill or disabled, but we know little about this group of family carers in New Zealand. In this study, utilising grounded theory methods, interviews were undertaken with 14 young carers and nine other members of nine families to explore their experiences of young caring. Young caring occurs in the context of family relationships and expectations, involving both choice and obligation, and for some, a strong sense of responsibility. Young carers contribute in a wide variety of ways and they report a range of responses to this role and its effects on their lives. Appropriate formal support services can reduce the level of family caring required, including that by young carers. Greater awareness of young carers is needed, along with adequate and acceptable support services for families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Zealand research suggests that CAM use by GPs has decreased, while referral to CAM practitioners by GPs has increased, and that patients often do not tell their health practitioners when they are using CAM. The New Zealand Medical Council has developed guidelines for GPs who use CAM. However, there is no research in New Zealand that looks at how patients and GPs respond to CAM issues in the consultation. This paper uses data collected for two research projects on doctor-patient interaction. For this research, consultations between 105 patients and nine GPs were video-recorded. In this data set, all doctors but one were 'orthodox' and to some degree reserved judgement on CAM, albeit remaining cautious in how they made this evident. Patients on the other hand demonstrated a variety of strategies to get CAM on the agenda, and GPs were careful to couch any criticism in such a way as to protect the 'face' of patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]