We examine the conditions for trust relationships between patients and physicians. A trust relationship is not normally negotiated explicitly, but we wanted to discuss it with both patients and physicians. We therefore relied on a combination of interviews and observations. Sixteen patients and 8 family physicians in Norway participated in the study. We found that trust relationships were negotiated implicitly. Physicians were authorized by patients to exercise their judgment as medical doctors to varying degrees. We called this phenomenon the patient's mandate of trust to the physician. A mandate of trust limited to specific complaints was adequate for many medical procedures, but more open mandates of trust seemed necessary to ensure effective and humane treatment for patients with more complex and diffuse illnesses. More open mandates of trust were given if the physician showed an early interest in the patient, was sensitive, gave time, built alliances, or bracketed normal behavior.

Unmarried, young women constitute a significant proportion of women who undergo unsafe abortion in Ethiopia. Based on material from an ethnographic study, the experiences of young, unmarried women who had been admitted to the hospital in the aftermath of an unsafe, clandestine abortion are explored in this article. The routes the young women followed in their search of abortion services and the concerns and realities they had to negotiate and navigate are at the fore. Despite their awareness of the dangers involved in clandestine and illegal abortion, the young women felt they had no choice but to use medically unsafe abortion services. Two reasons for this are highlighted: such services were affordable and, significantly, they were considered socially safe in that the abortion remained unknown to others and the stigma of abortion and its consequences could hence be avoided. In situations in which choices had to be made, social safety trumped medical safety. This indicates a need for abortion services that address both the medical and social safety concerns of young women in need of such services.

Background'Non-compliant’ individuals in opioid maintenance treatment, OMT, are often met with tight control regimes to reduce the risk of 'diversion’, which may lead to harm or death among persons outside of OMT. This article explores reported practices of, and motivations for, diversion of methadone and buprenorphine, in a group of imprisoned individuals in OMT.Findings28 in-depths interviews were conducted among 12 OMT-enrolled, imprisoned individuals, most of whom were remand prisoners. All had experienced tight control regimes prior to imprisonment due to varying degrees of 'non-compliance’ and illicit drug use during treatment. Their acquired norm of sharing with others in a drug using community was maintained when entering OMT. Giving one’s prescription opioids to an individual in withdrawal was indeed seen as an act of helping, something that takes on particular significance for couples in which only one partner is included in OMT and the other is using illicit heroin. Individuals enrolled in OMT might thus be trapped between practicing norms of helping and sharing and adhering to treatment regulations. ’Diversion’, as this term is conventionally used, is not typically understood as practices of giving and helping, but may nevertheless be perceived as such by those who undertake them.ConclusionsAs we see it, the need to sustain oneself as a decent person in one’s own eyes and those of others through practices such as sharing and helping should be recognized. Treatment providers should consider including couples in which both individuals are motivated for starting OMT.

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In this paper, which is empirically grounded in ethnographic research conducted among persons living in Norway without legal permission, we explore the temporal dimensions of irregular migration. In the first half, we consider the time aspects of migration control. In particular, we examine the politicization of time within the host of b/ordering policies, practices, and processes through which migrant irregularity is produced and governed in the Norwegian welfare state. We then move into a discussion of migrant irregularity as it is subjectively experienced, in which we solicit time as fundamental unit of analysis with the potential to render phenomenologically intelligible irregularity as it is lived and negotiated. In doing so, we draw upon two classical Greek concepts of time, chronos and kairos, and we consider the conditions of limitation and possibility for reckoning as meaningful experiences of and in time. This entails an exploration of the ways in which the research participants had emplotted their experiences within narratives that they, in retrospect, recalled having crafted at various points in their lives, and of the existential dilemmas that they confronted when these narratives could no longer be sustained. Ultimately, these endeavors produce an analysis of both these meaning-making strategies and what might be understood as the unique temporalities of irregular migration, as it is produced and governed, lived and embodied, and potentially also renegotiated and transformed.