Medical Technology Into Healthcare And Society

From bandage to the bioreactor, this book looks at five different device technologies from inception to healthcare practice, drawing on medical sociology, science and technology studies and political science. It examines 'evidence', regulation and governance processes, and diverse stakeholders in innovating the technologies that shape health care.

Although the use of new health technologies in healthcare and medicine is generally seen as beneficial, there has been little analysis of the impact of such technologies on people’s lives and understandings of health and illness. This ground-breaking book explores how new technologies not only provide hope for cure and well-being, but also introduce new ethical dilemmas and raise questions about the 'natural' body. Focusing on the ways new health technologies intervene into our lives and affect our ideas about normalcy, the body and identity, Medical Technologies and the Life World explores: how new health technologies are understood by lay people and patients how the outcomes of these technologies are communicated in various clinical settings how these technologies can alter our notions of health and illness and create ‘new illness’. Written by authors with differing backgrounds in phenomenology, social psychology, social anthropology, communication studies and the nursing sciences, this sensational text is essential reading for students and academics of medical sociology, health and allied studies, and anyone with an interest in new health technologies.

Improving healthcare and staying healthy is one of the most discussed and important issues in our society. Technology has played and will play an important role in many aspects of the healthcare system, and it offers new and better ways to solve the key health problems of the new century. This book describes valued contributions of technology for improving hospital and home healthcare, and gives a perspective on how they will influence critical aspects of future medical care. It provides an overview and discussion of trends, presents the state-of-the-art of important research areas, and highlights recent breakthrough results in selected fields, giving an outlook on game-changing developments in the coming decades. The material is arranged in 6 parts and a total of 31 chapters. The healthcare areas addressed are: General advances and trends in healthcare technology, diagnostic imaging, integration of imaging and therapy, molecular medicine, medical information technology and personal healthcare.

This book celebrates and captures examples of the excellent scholarship that Palgrave’s Health, Technology, and Society Series has published since 2006, and reflects on how the field has developed over this time. As a collection of readings drawn from twenty-two books, it is organized around five themes: Innovation, Responsibility, Locus of Care, Knowledge Production, and Regulation and Governance. Structured in this way, the book gives the reader a concise but nonetheless rich guide to the core issues and debates within the field. Complementing these narratives, the original authors have provided new reflection pieces on their texts and on their current work. This then is a book which in part looks back but also looks forward to emerging issues at the intersection of health, technology, and society. It uniquely encompasses and presents a range of expertise in a novel way that is both timely and accessible for students and others new to the field.

Offers health care professionals vital information about risks, benefits, and costs of new medical technologies to help them make informed decisions

Examines a range of current innovative health technologies, exploring how far they change the boundaries between the body, health, technology relationship, and assessing the contribution a critical social science can make towards our understanding of this shift.

Winner of the British Sociological Association Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize, 2012. This book traces the changes in healthcare implicated in telecare technologies: information and communication technologies that enable care at a distance. What happens when healthcare moves from physical to virtual encounters between healthcare professionals and patients? What are the consequences for patients when they are expected to do things that used to be done by healthcare professionals? What actually happens when homes become electronically wired to healthcare organizations? These are urgent questions that are, however, largely absent in dominant discourses on telecare. Drawing on insights from science, technology, and human geography, this work opens up novel accounts of the adoption and use of new technologies in healthcare. Nelly Oudshoorn shows how telecare technologies participate in redefining the responsibilities and identities of patients and healthcare professionals, introducing a new category of healthcare workers, and changing the kinds of care and spaces where healthcare is situated. This book intervenes critically into discourses that celebrate the independence of place and time by showing how places and physical contacts still matter in care at a distance.

The very rapid pace of advances in biomedical research promises us a wide range of new drugs, medical devices, and clinical procedures. The extent to which these discoveries will benefit the public, however, depends in large part on the methods we choose for developing and testing them. Modern Methods of Clinical Investigation focuses on strategies for clinical evaluation and their role in uncovering the actual benefits and risks of medical innovation. Essays explore differences in our current systems for evaluating drugs, medical devices, and clinical procedures; health insurance databases as a tool for assessing treatment outcomes; the role of the medical profession, the Food and Drug Administration, and industry in stimulating the use of evaluative methods; and more. This book will be of special interest to policymakers, regulators, executives in the medical industry, clinical researchers, and physicians.