Uncertainty in Medical Innovation Experienced Pioneers in Neonatal Care

by Mesman, Jessica

• ISBN13: 9780230216723
• ISBN10: 0230216722
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-11-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is a site where hi-tech medicine and vulnerable human beings come into close contact. Focusing on a number of medical and ethical challenges encountered by staff and parents, this book provides a new perspective on the complexity of these treatments and the inventiveness of those involved. *Winner of the British Sociology Association's Sociology of Health and Illness Prize*

Author Biography

Jessica Mesman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Technology and Society Studies, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands.

Table of Contents

Series Editors' Preface	p. vii
Glossary	p. ix
Neonatology: A Permanent Dynamic of Change	p. 1
Medical innovation, societal responses, and practical implications	p. 2
Exnovating competence and structures	p. 4
Significant fields of insight	p. 7
Mortality, morbidity, and morality	p. 12
A journey begins	p. 17
Newly Born and Indeterminate	p. 19
Defining the specific situation	p. 20
Constructing child and NICU	p. 26
The child as construct	p. 28
The NICU as construct	p. 33
Styles of reasoning	p. 35
The use of repertoires	p. 41
Co-travellers	p. 46
Mutual expectations	p. 49
Staff members' expectations of parents	p. 49
Parents' expectations of staff	p. 52
Vocabularies of expectations	p. 55
Parents as object of care	p. 57
Parents as bearers of parental authority	p. 61
It is the doctor who decides	p. 65
It is the parents who decide	p. 66
It is the law that decides	p. 67
Reconciling competing vocabularies	p. 71
Who decides?	p. 71
When is a decision taken?	p. 75
Styles of ordering and social orders	p. 77
Uncertain Trajectories	p. 80
Determining a treatment trajectory	p. 82
Time as risk and ally	p. 82
The use of protocols	p. 86
Technology's role on the treatment trajectory	p. 93
Technology and care	p. 93
Disciplining the treatment practice	p. 97
Technology as problem	p. 101
Numbers as compass	p. 104
A reliable instrument	p. 105
The interpretation of numbers	p. 107
Number versus number	p. 109
Competing knowledge frames	p. 111
The NICU as a quantitative practice	p. 113
Beacons on the Horizon	p. 116
Position and prognosis	p. 119
The specificity of the perspective	p. 121
The specificity of acting	p. 122
A topography of experience	p. 124
Distance versus proximity	p. 125
Observing versus comparing	p. 130
Hands-on versus hands-off	p. 132
Prognostic markers	p. 136
Exemplary cases	p. 137
Technological markers	p. 141
Rhythm and pace	p. 144
Spatial markers	p. 147
Experience and expectation	p. 150
The Moral Load	p. 152
The nature of the decision	p. 154
Evidence	p. 156
Asymmetry	p. 158
The functionality of relocation	p. 160
Robustness	p. 161
Creating a basis for consensus	p. 166
Another trajectory, another order	p. 170
The End of the Journey	p. 179
Moments of reflection	p. 180
Rewriting the past in reflection	p. 184
Situating knowledge and morality in treatment processes	p. 187
Opening up the in-between zone	p. 187
Experienced pioneers	p. 190
Notes	p. 195
Bibliography	p. 205
Index	p. 215
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.