Past mini-conference participant Boris Hauray and colleagues are publishing a new edited volume, Conflict of Interest and Medicine: Knowledge, Practices, and Mobilizations, coming out in September 2021.

The volume includes a chapter from Hauray on “A Genealogy of Conflict of Interest”, and another chapter from mini-conference organizer Étienne Nouguez on “In Whose Best Interest? Framing Pharmacists’ and Physicians’ (Conflicts of) Interest in the French Market for Generic Drugs”.

Other contributors to the volume include Melanie Jeske, Annie Martin, Jérôme Greffion, Hélène Michel, Marc Rodwin, Henri Boullier, Jean-Paul Gaudillière, Solène Lellinger, Christian Bonah, Giovanni Prete, Jean-Noël Jouzel, François Dedieu, Emmanuel Henry, and Sergio Sismondo.

A blurb from the publisher can be seen below:

In the context of a growing criticism on the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on physicians, scientists, or politicians, Conflict of Interest and Medicine offers a comprehensive analysis of the conflict of interest in medicine anchored in the social sciences, with perspectives from sociology, history, political science, and law.

Based on in-depth empirical investigations conducted within different territories (France, the European Union, and the United States) the contributions analyze the development of conflict of interest as a social issue and how it impacts the production of medical knowledge and expertise, physicians’ work and their prescriptions, and also the framing of health crises and controversies. In doing so, they bring a new understanding of the transformations in the political economy of pharmaceutical knowledge, the politicization of public health risks, and the promotion of transparency in science and public life.

Complementing the more normative and quantitative understandings of conflict of interest issues that dominate today, this book will be of interest to researchers in a broad range of areas including social studies of sciences and technology, sociology of health and illness, and political sociology and ethics. It will be also a valuable resource for health professionals, medical scientists, or regulators facing the question of corporate influence.

Learn more about and order the book here.

Former mini-conference participant Susanne Brucksch, principal researcher at the German Institute for Japanese Studies, has recently published an edited volume Humans and Devices in Medical Contexts: Case Studies from Japan with co-editor Kaori Sasaki through Palgrave MacMillan’s Health, Technology, and Society book series.

The volume includes 12 chapters from 14 different contributors, touching on topics such as “Experiences with Radiation”, “Patient Safety, End-of-life and High-tech medicine”, “Innovation and Diffusion of Medical Devices”, and “Engineering and Evaluating Medical Technology”.

A description of the book can be found from the publishers:

This book explores the ways in which socio-technical settings in medical contexts find varying articulations in a specific locale. Focusing on Japan, it consists of nine case studies on topics concerning: experiences with radiation in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima; patient security, end-of-life and high-tech medicine in hospitals; innovation and diffusion of medical technology; and the engineering and evaluating of novel devices in clinical trials. The individual chapters situate humans and devices in medical settings in their given semantic, pragmatic, institutional and historical context. A highly interdisciplinary approach offers deep insights beyond the manifold findings of each case study, thereby enriching academic discussions on socio-technical settings in medical contexts amongst affiliated disciplines. This volume will be of broad interest to scholars, practitioners, policy makers and students from various disciplines, including Science and Technology Studies (STS), medical humanities, social sciences, ethics and law, business and innovation studies, as well as biomedical engineering, medicine and public health.

More about the book can be found here.

MedHealth Mini-Conference organizer Kathryn Ibata-Arens has published a new book, titled Pandemic Medicine: Why the Global Innovation System is Broken, and How We Can Fix It. The book examines patenting in China, India, Japan, and elsewhere to suggest new approaches to innovation that would benefit global human health.

A description of the book from Lynne Rienner Publishers can be found here:

Despite a century of advances in modern medicine, as well as the rapid development of Covid vaccines, the global pharmaceutical industry has largely failed to bring to market drugs that actually cure disease. Why? And looking further … How can government policies stimulate investment in the development of curative drugs? Is there an untapped potential for “natural medicines” in new drug discovery? How have private–public sector partnerships transformed the ways we innovate? To what extent are medicinal plant biodiversity and human health codependent?

Addressing this range of increasingly critical questions, Kathryn Ibata-Arens analyzes the rise and decline of the global innovation system for new drug development and proposes a policy framework for fast-tracking the implementation of new discoveries and preparing for future pandemics.

The book can be ordered now in hardcover and paperback, here.

Welcome to the SASE MedHealth Mini-Conference website. On this website, you will find an archive of our past meetings, information about our upcoming 2022 meeting in Amsterdam, and updates of new publications from our past participants.

For past participants, please use this Google Form to:

• Let us know if you would like for us to link to your personal/professional website on our past participants page;
• Or if you have a publication related to medicine and health that you would like featured on the updates section of this website.

Otherwise, if you have any other suggestions for the website or future potential MedHealth mini-conferences, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at medhealthsase2020 (at) gmail (dot) com.

The organizers would like to thank Aman Dembe for helping put together the website.