This paper aims to explore how pervasive constructions regarding a person's sex and gender identity in society law limit the human rights of persons with variations characteristics. Societal culture promulgates binary (male/female) ideal which includes standards normality for our bodies. People who do not easily fit these culturally constructed norms, such as characteristics, encounter numerous...

Distinguishing the sick from the healthy has always been a fundamental challenge for medicine. A chief concern has been to guard against missing disease, with the focus on problems of underdiagnosis and undertreatment. Yet with the modern technological expansion of healthcare in rich developed nations, sceptical voices have long warned of the flipside—too much medicine. Mounting evidence about ...

The People's Republic of China is home to over 20 million d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people, many among them belonging to ethnic minorities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two minority regions, the Tibet Autonomous Region and the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, this article comparatively discusses findings on sign language use, education and state welfare policies. The situation in the...

Informed by primary interviews and observational research conducted by the authors with women prisoners in Northern Ireland, this article focuses on prison as an institutional manifestation of women's powerlessness and vulnerability, particularly those enduring mental ill-health. It contextualises their experiences within continua of violence and 'unsafety'. It also considers official responses...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW Polypill and its role in cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention has been extensively discussed and debated since the inception of the concept in 2003. This article reviews the subsequent accumulated research in this area. RECENT FINDINGS Several short and intermediate to long-term studies with different brands of polypills have analysed the impact of polypill in phase II an...

BACKGROUND Medicine is recognised as a dominant source of governmentality and social regulation, and although nursing has been implicated in the same process, analytical work in this area has been sparse. OBJECTIVES The article aims to present an analysis of nursing records in order to understand the structural and social processes that mediate the texts. METHODS 45 sets of nursing records ...

This paper will explore some difficulties with the concept of depression from the perspective of critical realism. W e have three aims. First, we will describe the variable, and sometimes incommensurable, ways in which the diagnosis of depression has been defined and discussed in professional mental health texts. Secondly, we will examine this confusion in relation to historical and cross-cultu...