Yosuke Shimazono

Background Effective social and behavioral sciences teaching in medical education requires integration with clinical experience, as well as collaboration between social and behavioral sciences experts and clinical faculty. However, teaching models for achieving this integration have not been adequately established, nor has the collaboration process been described. This study aims to propose a collaborative clinical case conference model to integrate social and behavioral sciences and clinical experience. Additionally, we describe how social and behavioral science experts and clinical faculty collaborate during the development of the teaching method. Methods A team of medical teachers and medical anthropologists planned for the development of a case conference based on action research methodology. The initial model was planned for a 3-h session, similar to a Clinicopathological Conference (CPC) structure. We evaluated each session based on field notes taken by medical anthropologists...

Suppose that you have undergone a kidney transplant after months or years of life on dialysis. A transplant surgeon has made an incision into your belly and, as he usually does, placed a new kidney into the abdominal cavity. He has sutured together the renal arteries and veins and iliac arteries and veins of your body; he has also connected a ureter to the bladder. A pale kidney has turned rosy, as if it has come back to life. The surgeon has stitched up the surgical incision. Now you have become a kidney recipient. Is this new kidney, which was removed from a donor’s body and was once his or her organ, your kidney? Is it part of your body? Is it a part of you? The purpose of this paper is to explore how organ transplant patients experience this unique, novel, or even extraordinary way of being and having a body. What kind of bodily experiences does an organ transplant give rise to? How do organ recipients reestablish the relationship between the body and the self or between the bodily “I” and “my” body in the face of the presence of a foreign organ inside “my” body? ? I address these questions with a particular focus on kidney transplantation in the Philippines.

This paper considers living-related kidney transplantation, especially that between family members in the Philippines. Drawing on the anthropological theory of gift, it explores two aspects of the gift relationship—the relationship between the do-nor and the recipient and the relationship between the recipient and the object—anddescribes two categories of acts—‘acknowledging the debt/repaying the gift of life’and ‘taking care of a kidney/cherishing the gift’. This paper seeks to show that there isan internal tension in live kidney transplantation between two rival principles of giftoperative in the world of Filipino family and kinship: one akin to the Maussian or ‘ar-chaic’ gift and the other that places cherishing of the gift over repaying of the debt.

The development of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) over the past several decades has enabled infertile couples to fulfill their desire to have children. Surrogacy has been the most contentious use of ARTs. The use of ARTs in general and surrogacy in particular has been increasing in Asian countries during the past two decades, and commercial surrogacy is being practiced in Thailand. This study explores this new form of surrogacy, which we call “message board surrogacy,” in Thailand. This article addresses the following questions based on interviews conducted with Thai women who were seeking surrogacy arrangements through online message boards: Who are the prospective surrogates? What are their motivations? What are their views about surrogacy? We then discuss the costs and benefits of this form of surrogacy compared with those of organized and institutionalized commercial surrogacy and address the public policy issues this practice raises.

Lalaine Siruno is a PhD research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature (CSMN), University of Oslo. Before coming to Norway, she taught Philosophy at the University of the Philippines, Diliman and did research on organ donation and the ethics ...