Based on fieldwork in Quebec, in a home for 14 older people who were diagnosed with dementia - the Carpe Diem - the central proposal of this article is to suggest "alienation" as a way to rethink dementia care. This is based on the insight that the notion of personhood can become a fallacy of care when understood as continuity with the past and empathy, as is often the case in person-centered care. Alienation here consists of three central elements: ordinariness, prosthetics, and a critical reflection on origins, by paying attention to "what is wrong" in assemblages of care.

Migration from Africa to Europe has become increasingly precarious due to repressive European border policies, increasing the frequency of forced returns and affecting the psychosocial health of involuntary returnees. Ethnographic research in Dakar shows that forced returnees face psychological distress mediated by the experience of failure, leading to a stigmatized state of marginalization and dishonor (, in Wolof) that damages family and community bonds. Emotional suffering is expressed through relevant sociocultural idioms, such as emotional withdrawal and the . Returnees confront these challenges through active tactics of resilience, navigating a landscape characterized by therapeutic pluralism.

Abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs) are pathologic enlargements of the aorta that, if they rupture, are usually fatal. Patients can undergo high-risk surgery to prevent rupture. We explored AAA patients' surgical journeys to understand decision-making and unmet needs. Major interview themes included fear of death, risk perception, importance of partner support, communication with providers, and preparedness for surgery and recovery. The nature of AAAs as chronic conditions that can suddenly become acutely life-threatening lends a unique context to patient decision-making. Understanding patient perspectives and values when undergoing AAA repairs can improve surgeons' abilities to meet patient needs and facilitate shared decision-making.

Although transgender women have increasingly expressed interest in uterine transplants as a means of pregnancy and gender-affirmation, the 2013 Montreal Code excludes them from consideration due - in part - to their perceived biological difference. Based on data from 54 semi-structured interviews, I examine how the regulation of uterine transplants in the USA reinforces dominant beliefs about sex/gender and the regulation of trans women in other domains (i.e. custody and adoption). I also discuss access to uterine transplants through the lens of reproductive justice, including its implications for not only trans women but also cisgender women and people of diverse gender backgrounds.

Diverging from care modalities based on psyche, "Confucianized" psychomoral training for Chinese officials who suffer from heartache (mental distress and ethical conflicts) emphasizes the heart/ as the moral core and its affective and aesthetic attunement in achieving harmony. However, the focus on the heart, while valuable in "indigenizing" or recasting psychology from Chinese precepts, remains tied to state ideologies. Such training moralizes structural issues that have generated heartache. This dual process of "indigenization" and Confucianization highlights contentious roles psychotherapists and moral psychologists play in cultivating a form of therapeutic governance anchored in the heart that straddles party-state and market in the name of care.

As antimicrobial use is more tightly regulated, animal medicine is under pressure. Drawing on UK fieldwork with veterinarians, farmers, and animal health providers, this article examines how animal health practices are being reorganized. It argues that antimicrobial reductions have not driven the systemic changes some predict. Instead, the antibiotic era's legacy persists, shaping preventive efforts and reinforcing data-driven control. As veterinary roles are marginalized, the illusion of mastery over animal life endures. It is an illusion that risks undermining progress on antimicrobial resistance by reinforcing, rather than challenging, dominant forms of biopolitical control.

Utilizing a symbolic interactionist lens in analysis of 16 in-depth interviews with 13 women and three men who had used fertility treatments in the United States, I reveal how the uterus was a powerful symbol for those struggling with infertility as they drew upon cultural norms and co-created meaning through interactions with multiple others. The uterus represented more than a biological body part; it symbolized the cultural power of biomedicine and created biographical disruptions that affected people's self-perceptions as women, mothers, wives, and lovers. Findings further uncover the relationship between science, medicine, culture, and identity and the body.

We analyze the ways in which different researchers and health professionals in Argentina (physicians, biochemists, epidemiologists) develop their arguments against mass vaccination against COVID-19. In particular, we explore how these positions are related to the mobilization of scientific knowledge-or arguments compatible with scientific reasoning-and to issues related to other interests (professional, political, economic, among others). Our aim is to advance the understanding of a potentially contradictory position: that of researchers and health professionals who hold positions that contradict some of the principles that hegemonically articulate the professional field.

Human papillomavirus (HPV)-related anal infection is high among African gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (MSM). In Kenya, queer men living with HPV-related anal warts often avoid health facilities, fearing homophobic retaliation from providers. In this paper, we present data collected over 24 months of ethnographic research, foregrounding the therapeutic trajectories of 35 men with advanced cases of anal warts requiring surgical intervention. The therapeutic trajectories we present here help to make visible how iatrogenesis exceeds the clinic's socio-spatial, temporal, and institutional confines and spills out into the intimate, social, and political spheres of human existence.

In Malta, palliative care is often seen by nurses, policymakers and others as care of doing nothing. In my study, I demonstrate how nurses working in a palliative care unit attend to what, in the Maltese language, are called ċuċati: seemingly trivial acts that, even within palliative care, are often not recognized as legitimate forms of care, yet have a profound effect on patients' well-being. In this article, I highlight a paradoxical relationship between the ċuċati and formal recognition. Formal recognition, while providing a means to legitimization, also risks depersonalizing the ċuċati, potentially undermining nurses' intent to improve patients' well-being.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the medical practices of Miao internal migrants in China, in this article we critique the hierarchical and discrete ontologies of "pluralism" prevalent in anthropological studies of medical pluralism. It examines how Miao migrants construct an informal pluralistic medical system that integrates shamanistic ritual healing, herbalism, and "folk" biomedicine within a pragmatically grounded yet spiritually coherent framework rooted in Miao religion and cosmologies. Furthermore, we explore how their medical-seeking practices, grounded in a transcendent ontology of well-being, operate through affective economies of trust and , thereby enhancing their medical resilience and socio-economic embeddedness into local society.

Inequality in cancer is often framed as disparities in mortality, incidence, and treatment. Cancer rehabilitation aims to help people live the best possible life with cancer, regardless of their background. In this study, I explore how people with lung cancer who are not participating in rehabilitation perceive and navigate everyday life. I use the concepts "biographical disruption," "biographical flow," and "struggling along" to conceptualize their way of life as a "coming-around" existence. I argue that inequality in cancer rehabilitation should go beyond unequal participation and focus on unequal opportunities to be understood and embraced by the healthcare system.

As radical genres of self-care are co-opted under neoliberal logics, I track an emerging "bubble-bathification" of self-care, which foregrounds rest as a therapeutic avenue toward mental health. Fieldwork at Canadian universities demonstrates that the promotion of restful self-care is often juxtaposed against environments of systemic exhaustion, resulting in a cycle of fatigue for students perpetrated by the sources promoting restorative breaks. There is a simultaneous desire among students to divest themselves from inactivity in favor of pursuing justice-oriented change in their communities. I conclude that social, mental, and bodily unrest are mutually constitutive in understanding how exhaustion threatens people's selfhood.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Ghanaian officials and international developers in the field of health information systems, we investigate how innovations in health data infrastructures are aligned with global practices of epidemiological accountability. The digital health information system DHIS2 has been adopted in various low- and middle-income countries, including Ghana. While global stakeholders render public health a matter of efficiency and accountability, public health professionals attune at various levels to emerging global health priorities and data practices, e.g. the translation of standard case definitions and quantitative measures into local contexts, or innovations in reporting channels of key public health indicators.

We examine diagnostic expansion of ADHD in Israel, based on interviews with mothers who came to identify with the ADHD label after their children were diagnosed. Applying a feminist psychiatric disability perspective, we show that diagnoses reverberate in families and raise unexpected stakes, meanings, and possibilities for mothers. In particular, women's social role as mothers is central to a sense of "failure" that they associate with ADHD, as well as a main site of self-cultivation, experimentation, and change. Diagnostic expansion is thus an open-ended and relational process, implicating multiple dimensions of self over the life course.

The relationship between African governments and ethnomedical practices is marked by policy dilemma and ideological conflicts. Through an ethnographic study spanning 2016-17 and employing "violence" as an analytical framework, this article shows how the socialist Derg regime in Ethiopia (1974-1991) devastated ethnomedicinal practice of ethnic Kumpal. The regime persecuted practitioners, accusing them of aiding insurgents with bulletproofing remedies, dismissing their beliefs as feudal remnants, and coercing the community to renounce traditions through oathing. The article presents an uncommon case study of brutal forms of violence by an African socialist regime targeting its own people over their ethnomedical practices.

At a time of rising public interest in the human microbiome and calls for increased microbe literacy in public health, few studies have explored how different segments of the US public understand gut health. To address this gap, An exploratory ethnographic study was conducted in Southern Arizona. The study identified five themes that encompass Pasteurian militaristic and post-Pasteurian ecological perceptions of gut health, gut adaptability, and probiotic/antibiotic influence on" natural immunity." Future microbe literacy programs will need to engage with local ideas about gut health, build upon points of convergence with bioscience, and identify points of divergence that challenge public health initiatives.

Open Dialogue is a rights-based approach to psychiatric crisis response with growing global uptake. Over the last five years, it has been subject to a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) within the UK's National Health Service. While the trial researchers have emphasized the need for more evidence to inform policy, many practitioners involved in the trial have been lobbying for Open Dialogue's immediate rollout across the country. Drawing on 24 months of clinical ethnography, we suggest this tension reveals moral dimensions of mental health care that are not adequately accounted for in evidence-based psychiatry.

The analysis of the intersection between race and microbiome science is a growing area in the social sciences, but little scholarly attention has been given to how population categories, that often have a racial subtext when applied to the Global South, are constructed, or how they intersect with or diverge from local conceptions of race. Drawing on research on an EU-funded human microbiome project involving Italian and Tunisian researchers, I argue that population categories in microbiome research are not merely imposed, but are continuously negotiated and co-constructed with local, homegrown racial categories.