Suffering experiences of people with cancer undergoing chemotherapy: A meta-ethnographic study.

This meta-ethnography had the objectives of identifying, evaluating, and summarizing the findings of qualitative studies regarding the suffering experiences of people undergoing chemotherapy, as well as developing an explanatory conceptual structure regarding what affects these experiences. A systematic literature review was carried out, covering the past 10 years, in the following databases: CINAHL, Embase, Medline, LILACS and Scopus. By using meta-ethnographic synthesis methods, the following themes were found: the pain of loss; evaluating, measuring, and neutralizing the threat; and social contours of suffering. The experience of living with cancer and undergoing chemotherapy was synthesized into a theoretical-explanatory model with a structure that resembles barbed-wire loops. The model expresses people's suffering experiences as marked by the feeling of loss, restraint of emotions, and resilience. While transcendent movements broke the cycle of suffering, resilience emerged as a learning experience that made patients more resistant to the pain of loss. The results indicated a complex and diverse set of factors that influence suffering, which confirmed that experiences are individual, comprehensive, and continuously reinterpreted.

On the limitations of barriers: Social visibility and weight management in Cuba and Samoa.

Obesity is an enduring global health challenge. Researchers have struggled to understand the barriers and facilitators of weight loss. Using a cross-cultural comparative approach, we move away from a barriers approach to analyze obesity and overweight through the lens of social visibility to understand the persistent failure of most obesity interventions. Drawing on ethnographic data from Cuba and Samoa collected between 2010 and 2017, we argue that social visibility is a framework for analyzing some of the reasons why people do not participate in weight management programs when they have high rates of health literacy and access to free or low-cost programming. Comparing these two places with very different histories of obesity interventions, we trace how weight management practices make people socially visible (in positive and negative ways), specifically analyzing how gender and economic inequalities shape the sociality of obesity. Our findings show that regardless of barriers and facilitators of weight loss at an individual and population level, the ways weight loss activities are incorporated into or conflict with the social dynamics of everyday life can have a profound effect on weight management. Employing visibility as a analytic framework de-individualizes weight responsibility, providing a contextual way to understand the difficulties people face when they manage their weight.

La investigación etnográfica en la Escuela Nacional de Enfermería y Obstetricia / Ethnographic research at the National School of Nursing and Obstetrics

En este documento se presenta el panorama de la Introducción de la metodología de las ciencias sociales como es la antropología y la Investigación de tipo etnográfico, a la formación de recursos de enfermería en la Escuela Nacional de Enfermería y Obstetricia (ENEO), situación que se ha visto favorecida por la aparición de nuevas demandas hacia las profesiones de la salud por parte de la sociedad, que han exigido el redimensionamiento del campo de actividad y del sistema de conocimientos, habilidades y valores profesionales, como condición del desempeño exitoso, bajo las nuevas condiciones del mundo globalizado y las necesidades de atención a poblaciones culturalmente diversas, cuestión que en nuestro país es pan de todos los días.

This paper presents an overview of the introduction of the methodology of social sciences, as anthropology and ethnographic research, to the training of nursing resources at the National School of Nursing and Obstetrics (Acronym in Spanish: ENEO). A situation like that, has been fueled by the emergence of new demands on the health professions by the society, who have required the downsizing of the field of business and system knowledge, skills and professional values, as a condition of successful performance under new conditions in the globalized world, and the new care needs of the population culturally diverse, a question that in our country is daily bread.