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A Metadata Extraction Approach for Clinical Case Reports to Enable Advanced Understanding of Biomedical Concepts
Published on: September 20, 2018
Dis-ease or disease?: ontological rarefaction in the medical-industrial complex
1Iowa State University, Ames, USA. grahamss@iastate.edu
Abstract:
Recent scholarship in medical humanities has expressed strong concern over the ability of pharmaceuticals companies to medicalize discomfort and subsequently invent diseases. In this article, I explore the clinical debates over the ontology of the sinus headache as a possible counter-case. Extending Foucault's concept of principles or rarefaction, this paper documents the efforts of clinicians to resist the pharmaceutically-provided understanding of the sinus headache. In so doing, it offers institutions of rarefaction and rarefactive assemblages as useful heuristics for the exploration of disease legitimization discourse.
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