Research programmes, data analysis, and conduct of clinical trials have traditionally been the preserve of clinicians and researchers. Now, however, social media and crowdsourcing are becoming ever present and widely used. For example, Crowdsourcing Cancer Research: The Role of Quantitative Challenges was a recent topic at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting in San Diego on April 7, 2014. Indeed, social media is empowering patients in ways that are changing how clinical research is done, but are these changes beneficial or do they undermine integrity?

Online social media tools can be some of the most rewarding and informative resources for scientists—IF you know how to use them.

This article discusses how the "illness" dimension of human distress are being medicalized and the impact on the patient.

Most cultures exhibit a particular configuration or style. A single value or pattern of perceiving the world often leaves its stamp on several institutions in the society. Examples are "machismo" in Spanish-influenced cultures, "face" in Japanese culture, and "pollution by females" in some highland New Guinea cultures. Here Horace Miner demonstrates that "attitudes about the body" have a pervasive influence on many institutions in Nacirema society.

Tallies were made of outcomes of all resonably controlled comparisons of psychotherapies with each other and with other treatments. For comparisons of psychotherapy with each other, most studies found insignificant differences in proportions of patients who improved (though most patients benefited). This "tie score effect" did not apply to psychotherapies vs psychopharmacotherapies compared singly-psychotherapies did better. Combined treatments often did better than single treatments. Among the comparisons, only two specially beneficial matches between type of patient and type of treatment were found. 

In this book Margaret Lock explicitly compares Japanese and North American medical and political accounts of female middle age to challenge Western assumptions about menopause. She uses ethnography, interviews, statistics, historical and popular culture materials, and medical publications to produce a richly detailed account of Japanese women's lives. The result offers irrefutable evidence that the experience and meanings--even the endocrinological changes--associated with female midlife are far from universal. Rather, Lock argues, they are the product of an ongoing dialectic between culture and local biologies.
 

The initial findings of this study indicate that menopause is regarded as a natural life-cycle transition in Japan in which the biological marker of cessation of menstruation is not considered to be of great importance.
 

Based on twenty years of clinical experience studying and treating chronic illness, a Harvard psychiatrist and anthropologist argues that diagnosing illness is an art tragically neglected by modern medical training, and presents a compelling case for bridging the gap between patient and doctor.

This webpage from the Society for Medical Anthropology ( A Section of the American Anthropological Association) opens up the discussion on  ‘What is Medical Anthropology'. 

All kinds of abnormalities (in our culture) function with ease and honor in other cultures, and apparently without danger or difficulty to the society. The author discusses especially the trance, homosexuality, and megalomania. The categories of the abnormal in our civilization are prevailing local types of instability. Although they give some information about the stresses and strains of western civilization, they afford no final picture of inevitable human nature. Conclusions about such behavior must await the collection of psychiatric data from other cultures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)