American Ethnologist features an article by Chantal Collard and Shireen Kashmeri, which examines how the practice of embryo adoption spurs new models of siblingship that the authors call: genetic, batch, gestational, and delayed siblingship. This issue also features book reviews of Tsipy Ivry’s “Embodying Culture: Pregnancy in Japan and Israel,” and of Marina de Regt’s “Pioneers or Pawns? Women Health Workers and the Politics of Development in Yemen.”

In Cultural Anthropology, Tom Boellstorff poses the question: “How can a cultural phenomena whose temporality appears suspect…help us reconsider the historicity of culture itself?” (p. 287) To address this question, he examines the category of “men who have sex with men but do not identify as gay” (abbreviated as MSM) – a category that is playing a key role in global HIV/AIDS discourses and in debates about self, community, health, and justice. Using a genealogical approach, Boellstorff examines three changes in this category and their cultural implications.

There is special April issue of Transcultural Psychiatry entitled “The Personal and the Professional: The Lives and Careers of Cultural Psychiatrists,” edited by Ronald Wintrob. It includes articles about the career of cultural psychiatry, and about the intersection of culture and psychiatric research/practice more broadly.

A special issue of Science, Technology, and Human Values explores “post-normal science” (PNS) – a term used in research on the “scientific, social, and political management of risk.” The articles explore the history, definitions, theoretical and empirical aspects, current uses, and critiques of PNS to contribute to work on this topic within science and technology studies and several other disciplines.

An open access article by Gerben Meynen in Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine develops a phenomenological account to show that worrying (a central feature of generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD) is not a helpful coping strategy and proposes cognitive behavioral therapy as a successful GAD treatment.

The “online first” section of Health contains three articles.

• Drew Thomas Halfmann reconceptualizes “medicalization,” taking into account its multiple aspects (i.e. discourses, practices, and identities) and multiple levels (i.e. macro, meso, and micro), as well as its interrelation with demedicalization. He then applies this new conceptualization to an analysis of two events in U.S. abortion history.
• In the context of people’s increased reliance on the internet for health information and increased engagement with medical pluralism, Yael Keshet examines and compares how complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is presented on the websites of several Israeli medical institutions.
• Anette Lykke Hindhede explores how adults cope with the diagnosis of hearing impairment, which can destabilize social interactions, sense of self, and bodily functionality.

This issue contains several articles that examine gender and reproductive issues, including the relationship of gender and diet; adolescent men and pregnancy decision-making; Ultra-orthodox Jewish women’s perceptions of pregnancy and prenatal testing; effects of infant breastfeeding on children’s academic performance; effects of domestic violence against women on child development.

Other relevant articles:

• two articles examine the effects of food in/security on perceived social capital and personal disparity as well as psychological distress.
• comparison of the 1990s health and economic crises in Cuba and Russia
• review of prior concepts of acculturation in healthcare research with U.S. Latino populations that then develops a new theoretical framework and policy recommendations to reduce health disparities.
• test of the “moral economy theory” through the examination of mental health care in French prisons and discussion of a “new moral economy of vulnerability”
• scrutiny of the “pharmaceutical uncertainty” surrounding diabetic medications in the EU and US.

This issue of Social Theory & Health contains two interesting articles that take up the issue of “capital” with respect to health/healthcare. One article reviews the concept of social capital in health research and redefines it, bridging its individual and collective facets. The other article examines how a kind of “personal capital” develops in the context of parents caring for their children with Batten disease. Another article draws on science and technology studies to examine “scientific certainty” in relation to how and why professionals resist evidence of the adverse health outcomes of caesarean sections as they prioritize “maternal choice.”

Two more articles:

• “The concept of lifeworld as a tool in analysing health-care work: Exploring professionals’ resistance to governance through subjectivity, norms and experiential knowledge” (Patrick Brown)
• “A critical review of theoretical frameworks for health service use among older immigrants in the United States” (Sunha Choi)

This issue of Sociology of Health & Illness includes articles about gender disparity in HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa; boundary work and peer review in science; lay meanings of sexual function; shift from recreational to regular drug use; “ethical boundary-work” among infertility clinicians; interactions among masculinity, health practices, and social class; violence in disabled people’s lives; concepts of “normality” in the narratives of people with rheumatoid arthritis; and small talk in medical interactions.

There are also several relevant book reviews, including reviews of “The Taste for Knowledge: Medical Anthropology Facing Medical Realities” (edited by Sylvie Fainzang, Hans Einar Hem, and Mette Bech Risor) and “Technogenarians: Studying Health and Illness Through an Ageing, Science, and Technology Lens” (edited by Kelly Joyce and Meika Loe).

Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine
Two articles concern the effects of the serotonin system on cardiovascular reactivity to social threat and to stress. Two articles examine aspects of depression: “Plasma Nitrate Levels and Flow-Mediated Vasodilation in Untreated Major Depression” (Garcia, Zarruk, Barrera, et.al.); “Cardiac Vagal Control in Nonmedicated Depressed Women and Nondepressed Controls: Impact of Depression Status, Lifetime Trauma History, and Respiratory Factors” (Cyranowski, Hofkens, Swartz, et.al.). Another article (Freedland, Mohr, Davidson, Schwartz) evaluates “the use of existing practice control groups in randomized controlled trials of behavioral interventions and the role of extrinsic health care services in the design and conduct of behavioral trials.”