This qualitative systematic review investigated how individuals with chronic illness experience online peer-to-peer support and how their experiences influence daily life with illness. Selected studies were appraised by quality criteria focused upon research questions and study design, participant selection, methods of data collection, and methods of analysis. Four themes were identified: (a) illness-associated identity work, (b) social support and connectivity, (c) experiential knowledge sharing, and (d) collective voice and mobilization. Findings indicate that online peer-to-peer communities provide a supportive space for daily self-care related to chronic illness. Online communities provided a valued space to strengthen social ties and exchange knowledge that supported offline ties and patient-doctor relationships. Individuals used online communities to exchange experiential knowledge about everyday life with illness. This type of knowledge was perceived as extending far beyond medical care. Online communities were also used to mobilize and raise collective awareness about illness-specific concerns.

The figure of the 'miracle cure'-peddling quack pretending spectacular properties for worthless tonics is iconic. From their 19th century traveling wagon shows to their 21st century Internet spam scams, hucksters and cranks have been consistently targeted by health authorities as a danger to public health. Yet, in this paper, I argue that this is only one form that the problem of 'quackery' has taken in the past two centuries or so in the United Kingdom. Just as Roy Porter showed how the mid-19th century professionalization of medicine gave rise to a 'quackery with a difference' as a whole range of new medical movements-homoeopathy, hydropathy, medical botany, mesmerism-actively denounced allopathic or modern medicine, I will suggest that the late 20th century birth of 'complementary and alternative medicine' (CAM) has resulted in yet another transformation in quackery. By examining the ways in which regulatory authorities in the UK have come to address what is invariably described as a 'growing interest in CAM', I will show how the problem of quackery today is increasingly located in an ethical field of practitioner competency, qualifications, conduct, responsibility and personal professional development, almost (but not quite) regardless of the form of therapy in question.

His comparative research has focused on the different ways in which herbal medicine (in Vietnam and the United Kingdom), and more recently reproductive medicine (in China and Denmark), have been mobilized, normalized and routinized in the past few decades. He is co-editor of Contested Categories: Life Sciences in Society (2009) and has published numerous journal articles on the social study of both herbal medicine and reproductive medicine. Ayo is holder of a Young Elite Researcher award from the Danish Council for Independent Research.

Commentators such as Goldacre, Dawkins, and Singh and Ernst are worried that the rise in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) represents a flight from science propagated by enemies of reason. We outline what kind of problem CAM use is for these commentators, and find that users of CAM have been constituted as duped, ignorant, irrational, or immoral in explaining CAM use. However, this form of problematization can be described as a flight from social science. We explore CAM use in light of a rigorous and robust social scientific body of knowledge about how individuals engage with CAM. By pointing to the push and pull factors, CAM user's experiences of their body, and the problem of patient choice in CAM use, we summarize some of the key findings made by social scientists and show how they trouble many of the reasoned assumptions about CAM use.

From a historical perspective, selective reproduction is nothing new. Infanticide, abandonment, and selective neglect of children have a long history, and the widespread deployment of sterilization and forced abortion in the twentieth century has been well documented. Yet in recent decades selective reproduction has been placed under the aegis of science and expertise in novel ways. New laboratory and clinical techniques allow for the selective fertilization of gametes, implantation of embryos, or abortion of fetuses. Although they will often overlap with assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), what we term selective reproductive technologies (SRTs) are of a more specific nature: Rather than aiming to overcome infertility, they are used to prevent or allow the birth of certain kinds of children. This review highlights anthropological research into SRTs in different parts of the world, discussing how selective reproduction engages with issues of long-standing theoretical concern in anthropology, such as politics, kinship, gender, religion, globalization, and inequality. 201 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2014.43:201-216. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by University of Central Florida on 02/04/15. For personal use only.