... This chapter examines two components of biomedical research from which therapies emerge: the phenomenon of evidence-based medicine and the business of clinical trials. These are the apparatuses of truth making in medicine. They define what counts as “good” medicine. Through them, research...

... five WHEN NUMBERS TRAVEL The Politics of Making Evidence-­Based Policy Chifundo, lead mayp supervisor, hands me the keys to the proj­ect storage room, from which I am meant to fetch...

... metrics can also be mobilized by indigenous communities themselves. Even as they dispute the purported universality of health metrics, the directors of Yup’ik behavioral health search for creative ways to demonstrate evidence of efficacy. They are cognizant of the ways health metrics confer legitimacy to...

... This chapter summarizes the main themes of the book and proposes several emergent trends that may offer counternarratives to the kinds of metrics practices that have taken precedence in global health work today. Efforts to promote multimethods research, to challenge the use of evidence-based...

... evidence-based knowledge, thereby thwarting the circulation of critical insights. The parents' and local leaders' response to the epidemic thus provides a model for how democratizing discourse about health as horizontal exchanges between diverse lay and professional knowledge producers can generate new...

... communities themselves. Even as they dispute the purported universality of health metrics, the directors of Yup’ik behavioral health search for creative ways to demonstrate evidence of efficacy. They are cognizant of the ways health metrics confer legitimacy to an international audience and may help...

... evidence-based medicine elaborate C artingh (Bio) Medicine and (Bio)Medicaliz ation in the United States, 1890 –Present (continued) The o Rise f Medicine Medicalization Biomedicalization ca. 1890–1945 ca. 1940–90...

... The second Times article, from May 10,11 followed through on an earlier Times story that pharmacies in Guangdong Province were selling out not only of antibiotics, but also of traditional Chinese medicines and ordi- nary salt.12 The unprecedented sale of salt was based on a rumor that salt...

... despite mounting evidence of suboptimal practice. For ex- ample, the Institute of Medicine’s 1999 report on medical error was criticized for fostering socially unproductive litigation (Brennan 2000). One might also specu- late that the medical profession’s continued rejection of pay-for-performance...

... longer-term ambitions for an en- tirely new medicine. Practical efforts to transform Chinese medicine by focus- ing on the use of single drugs or even chemical constituents of individual drugs instead of complicated prescriptions, by basing treatment on biomedi- cal rather than Chinese medical...

... evidence- based marketing strategy is that markets are made through evi- dence, and potential marketable evidence, gained via clinical trials, is the determining factor in running the trial in the first place. The pharmaceutical industry agrees that most contemporary clinical trials are too...

...- spite the intuitive appeal of this approach and the sound observational base of these surveys. As we shall see shortly, the actual processes whereby patients 108 Contemporary Chinese Medicine and their families arrive at decisions regarding health care choices are far more complex...

... part ii Modernity and Tradition in the Making 5. Slave Poison/Slave Medicine: The Persistence of Obeah in Early Nineteenth-Century Martinique john savage It is a little known fact of French literary history that perhaps the greatest author in the national canon...

... crystal-ball gazing (though, as I have argued in the previous chapter, such modes of prediction themselves have powerful influences in creating ethno- graphic windows and political terrains Both intuitively and from the hype that surrounds personalized medicine, it seems evident that there are...

...: : : : : :   Aesthetic Medicine and Motherhood Scholarly critiques of cosmetic surgery often assume that the practice essen- tially disfigures the body, or at least makes unnatural-looking changes: faces stretched in a mask, caricatures of the pert nose, balloonlike breasts...

... shall only comment on what the literature showed concerning hard evidence on the prevalence of folk medicine. The best quantitative study published to date was carried out by Barrie Cassileth and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania. This study involved 304 patients at the University...

... wide- 124 • ADAM WARREN spread dissemination of formal Spanish medical knowledge, Delgar argued the sick would do best to employ more mundane indigenous and popular folk remedies from the Andean highlands, many of which were based on the perceived medicinal properties of animals and plants...

..., 36 and highly formalized knowledge, a process examined in detail by Hsu. We can take as an example the reaction of the editors of the Great Encyclopedia 178 Contemporary Chinese Medicine of Chinese Medicine to Guo Yu’s statement, translated above, that medicine may be based on abilities...

... Chinese and Western medicine’’ (zhongxiyi hezuo This strategy reflected a pragmatic utilization of medical resources in the context of revolutionary ac- tivity based predominantly in the countryside but still influenced by Soviet 8 (i.e...

... pragmat• ics (1970). Recent research on the work of doctors shows that contemporary medicine is a place where resources coexist between frames: the establishment of "medical-decision making" formats, based on a conversational analysis of consultations (Silverman 1987); the distinction between...