The role of the internet in cancer patients' engagement with complementary and alternative treatments
The role of the internet in cancer patients' engagement with complementary and alternative treatments
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DOI：
10.1177/1363459307086841
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发表时间：
2008-04-01
期刊：
影响因子：
2.1
通讯作者：
Tovey, Philip
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Broom, Alex;Tovey, Philip
本文借鉴了一项对80名国民健康服务癌症患者的研究，以及他们在疾病和治疗过程中使用互联网的经历。它侧重于互联网在潜在或实际参与补充和替代医学（CAM）的背景下所扮演的角色。结果与之前的概念不同，即互联网是CAM知识的主要来源，其次是患者使用CAM的主要途径。此外，研究结果还强调了当患者试图在网上处理大量复杂的生物医学诊断和预后信息时，他们会产生明显的焦虑。对于试图接受癌症护理替代治疗模式的患者，暴露于预后数据可能会对个人健康和参与治疗实践构成相当大的风险。在这些结果的基础上，我们对互联网的社会理论提出了问题，认为它有助于以下事情：知识的民主化；医学的去专业化；病人授权。相反，我们强调互联网在加强生物医学在癌症治疗中的范例主导地位方面的潜在作用。
This article draws on a study of 80 National Health Service cancer patients and their experiences of using the Internet within disease and treatment processes. It focuses on the role the Internet plays in the context of potential or actual engagement with complementary and alternative medicine (CAM)The results depart from previous conceptualizations of the Internet as a major source of CAM knowledge, and second, as a major pathway to patient CAM usage. Moreover, the results highlight significant anxiety as patients attempt to process vast amounts of complex biomedical diagnostic and prognostic information online. For patients attempting to embrace alternative therapeutic models of cancer care, exposure to prognostic data may pose considerable risks to individual well-being and engagement with healing practices. On the basis of these results we problematize social theorizations of the Internet as contributing to such things as: the democratization of knowledge; the deprofessionalization of medicine; and patient empowerment. We emphasize, instead, the potential role of the Internet in reinforcing biomedicine's paradigmatic dominance in cancer care.