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Can mindful doctors take better care of their patients? How mindfulness can benefit medical care beyond serving as a clinical intervention for patients
Get PDFThe potential of mindfulness as a clinical intervention is increasinglyrecognized, yet less attention has been paid to how mindfulnesscan contribute to medical care when cultivated by physicians.This paper examines how mindfulness in practitioners can alleviatethree problems arising in contemporary medical care. Firstly,mindfulness could prevent flaws resulting from mindless medicalpractice by allowing practitioners to become more aware of theirpatients and their own cognitions. Secondly, mindfulness can alleviatethe problem of chronic stress and burnout in medical practitioners,thereby enhancing their care of patients. Finally, mindfulnesscan contribute to improving patient-practitioner-relationshipswhich often suffer in contemporary healthcare. In sum, mindfulnessin practitioners holds great potential for medical care; hence mindfulness-programs for physicians should be implemented
Downward-facing dog meets randomised controlled trial
No full textIm Verlauf der letzten Jahre hat medizinische Yoga-Forschung mehr und mehr an Bedeutung gewonnen. In klinischen Studien wird Yoga, welches ursprünglich keine medizinische Intervention, sondern eine philosophische und spirituelle Praxis, und heutzutage ein zunehmend populärer Sport ist, mit biomedizinischem Wissen und Methoden zusammengebracht. In meiner Arbeit beschäftige ich mich im Speziellen mit randomisierten kontrollierten Studien (RCTs) zu Yoga, da diese Methodologie als der Gold-Standard in heutiger evidenzbasierter Medizin (EBM) gilt, aber gleichzeitig einige Probleme für die Erforschung von Yoga mit sich bringt. Mein Ziel war es, diese Spannungen zu untersuchen, und wie diese von Forscher*innen verhandelt werden. Eine grundlegende Annahme meiner Arbeit war zudem, dass wissenschaftliche Praxis und insbesondere das Erstellen eines Studiendesigns eine Reihe von Wertungen enthält. In medizinischer Yoga-Forschung scheinen eine Vielzahl von Werten miteinander verwoben zu sein, angefangen von der Wertschätzung eines traditionellen Wissens, bzw. einer Praktik als solcher, über die Wertschätzung eines ganzheitlichen Ansatzes in der Medizin, hin zu dem Wunsch, Patienten durch die Etablierung einer neuen Therapieform zu helfen, sowie im (schul-)medizinischen System anerkannt zu werden. Mein Ziel war es, die situierten Wertungen zu untersuchen, die Forscher*innen vornehmen, wenn sie die Begegnung zwischen Yoga und Biomedizin methodologisch sowie theoretisch verhandeln. Darüber hinaus war mein Ziel, zu rekonstruieren wie diese konkreten Wertungen von breiteren institutionellen, strukturellen und diskursiven Werteregimen, die eine gewisse normative Macht auf die Wissenschaftler*innen ausüben, beeinflusst werden. In theoretischer Hinsicht bringt meine Arbeit somit die Beschäftigung mit Forschung im bio- und komplementärmedizinischen Bereich aus der Perspektive der Science and Technology Studies mit einem Valuation Studies inspirierten Ansatz zusammen. Methodisch beantworte ich meine Fragestellungen mittels qualitativer Interviews mit Forscher*innen die RCTs zu Yoga durchführen, welche auf einer explorativen Dokumentenanalyse aufbauen.
In meiner Arbeit zeige ich, dass Yoga in der medizinischen Forschung in einer Vielheit auftritt, und sowohl in verschiedenen Studien, als auch in verschiedenen lokalen und diskursiven Kontexten verschiedene Realitäten annimmt. Ich rekonstruiere des Weiteren fünf Werteregime die die Forscher*innen beeinflussen. Diese beziehen sich auf gute wissenschaftliche Praxis, das Handeln zugunsten von Patient*innen, persönlichen akademischen Erfolg, EBM, und biomedizinisches Wissen, wobei insbesondere die letztgenannten einen starken Einfluss auf die Forscher*innen, ihre Praktiken und Entscheidungen zu haben scheinen. In diesem Kontext sind verschiedene Versionen von Yoga mit ambivalenten und teilweise widersprüchlichen Wertungen verknüpft, und mehr oder weniger umfassende Formen von Yoga werden aus unterschiedlichen Gründen wertgeschätzt. Darüber hinaus identifiziere ich Praktiken des theoretischen und praktischen ‘tinkerns’ mit Yoga, wobei sowohl Yoga selbst als auch entsprechende Erklärungsmuster an verschiedene Kontexte angepasst werden. Ebenso beschreibe ich auch die methodischen Wertungen der Forscher*innen als ambivalent, einerseits den Wert des RCTs hervorhebend, andererseits eine methodische Vielfalt wertschätzend. Dies resultiert in verschiedenen Adaptionen von Methodologie, die es erlauben solch unterschiedliche Wertungen teilweise zu vereinen. Zuletzt scheinen auch die Auswirkungen der Yoga-Forschung von ambivalenter Natur zu sein. Während die Forschung von den befragten Wissenschaftler*innen einstimmig als ein positiver Beitrag zur Medizin gesehen wurde, erschienen die Auswirkungen auf Yoga sowohl als Potential als auch als Gefahr – einerseits als Aufwertung von Yoga durch erhöhte Anerkennung im medizinischen System, andererseits als nachteilige Veränderung von Yoga, einhergehend mit einer Art „Verkürzung“.
Meine Arbeit zeigt somit, dass medizinische Yoga-Forschung stark von den methodologischen Hierarchien der EBM, sowie von der Notwendigkeit, den Anforderungen biomedizinischen Wissens zu genügen, dominiert wird. Gleichzeitig stellt sie jedoch die Vielfältigkeit von Werten in der medizinischen Forschung heraus, sowie das innovative Potential das heterarchischen Wertekonstellationen in denen verschiedene Wertungen nebeneinander existieren können. Damit problematisiert meine Arbeit zu einem gewissen Grad simple hierarchische Anordnungen von Werten, Methoden und Wissen in medizinischer Forschung, und sie unterstreicht die Vorteile die entstehen können wenn komplexeren Wertungen mehr Raum gegeben wird.In recent years, medical research on yoga is increasing rapidly. Here, yoga, which is originally not a medical intervention but a philosophical and spiritual practice, and nowadays a popular form of sports and relaxation, is brought together with modern biomedicine, its knowledge and methods. In my thesis, I was particularly interested in the conduction of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) on yoga, since this method features as the ‘gold-standard’ in current evidence-based medicine (EBM), but also seems to bring along particular problems for the investigation of yoga. I was explicitly interested in investigating the presumed tensions that seem to arise when aiming to investigate yoga in RCTs and explaining it in biomedical terms, and how these are negotiated by researchers. A fundamental assumption of my thesis was that all acts of research and especially processes of setting up a research design involve different acts of valuation. In biomedical research on yoga, various different kinds of values seem to be entangled, relating, for example, to valuing a traditional knowledge or practice in itself, valuing a ‘holistic’ approach to medicine, wanting to benefit patients through establishing a new form of therapy, wanting to be accepted in the mainstream medical system, etc. In my research, I aimed to identify the situated valuations that researchers perform in negotiating the encounter between yoga and biomedicine methodologically as well as theoretically. Beyond this, I was also interested in reconstructing how these concrete valuations are related to broader institutional, structural, and discursive regimes of valuation that exert a certain normative power on the researchers. Theoretically, my thesis thus brings together the investigation of research in the fields of biomedicine and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) from the perspective of Science and Technology Studies with an approach inspired by the field of valuation studies. Methodologically, I approached my research questions through qualitative interviews with five researchers conducting RCTs on yoga, which were informed by an exploratory document analysis.
In my thesis, I show that yoga manifests in medical research as a multiplicity, taking different forms in different trials, as well as with respect to different local and discursive contexts. I reconstruct five regimes of valuation influencing the researchers’ work, related to good scientific practice, medical ethics/benefiting patients, personal academic success, EBM, and biomedical knowledge, where especially the two latter regimes seem to strongly structure the researchers’ work practices and decisions. Within this contextual framework, different versions of yoga are linked to ambivalent and partially contradicting valuations, with both more and less comprehensive versions of yoga being appreciated for different reasons. Moreover, I identify practices of tinkering with yoga, both on a practical and on a theoretical level, where yoga itself as well as its explanations are adapted to different contexts. Furthermore, the researchers’ valuations of methods turned out to be equally ambivalent, appreciating the RCT for various reasons, but also valuing methodological diversity. Hence, they tinker with methodology in different ways, thereby partially reconciling such ambivalent valuations. Last, also the outcomes of the researchers’ work seem to be of a double-edged nature. While the yoga research was by the participants unequivocally perceived as a positive contribution to medicine, its consequences for yoga were seen as both a promise and a peril – valorising it through raising its acceptance in the medical system, but potentially also threatening yoga through altering it and detaching it from its roots.
Overall, my research shows that the medical yoga research is strongly structured by the methodological framework of EBM, as well as by the understandings of biomedical knowledge. Yet, it simultaneously highlights the multiplicity of values that exists in medical research, and the innovative potential that is inherent to heterarchical constellations of worth, were different valuations exist alongside each other. My thesis thus to some extent problematizes crude hierarchical orderings of worth, of methods, and of knowledge in medical research, and emphasises the benefits that seem to arise from giving room to more complex valuations
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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