An Emergent Form of Life: Advanced Cancer Patients' Active Search for Life-extension through Treatment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the risks of side effects or the lack of prognostic benefits, patients with advanced cancer sometimes search for biomedical treatments intended to extend life. The current literature suggests that these individuals may be in denial of their poor prognosis or passively reliant on healthcare providers for such treatments. Drawing on a Foucauldian theoretical framework, this study generated a deeper understanding of how individuals might actively generate their own therapeutic possibilities. The purpose of this study was to examine the types of discourses that constitute the search for life-extension. The second purpose was to characterize the types of subjectivities that are produced by these discourses. Using case study as a methodological approach, seven cases were collected that included 20 semi-structured interviews (with patients, family, a natural healer, nurses, and physicians), 30 documents, and observations. Four major discourses were in operation: (1) Biomedicine, (2) Self-Care, (3) Palliative Care, and (4) Self-Healing. Eight types of subjectivities were identified: (1) The Cancer Expert, (2) The Proactive, (3) The Productive, (4) The Mistrusting, (5) The Model Patient, (6) The Positive Thinking, (7) The Suffering, and (8) The Challenged Clinician. Produced by the tensions between discourses and the incompatibility between subjectivities, this study characterized an emergent "form of life" that was governed by the difficult task of prolonging life despite having an incurable disease. Participants described much suffering as a result of this elusive pursuit. More than procuring treatment, the search for life-extension became an aesthetical process of shaping the self in order to become robust subjects that survive cancer. Relying on their own curative capacities, this emerging category of the chronically dying often challenged the traditional arrangements of bio-scientific knowledge and curative treatment practices. Generating social tensions in the clinical setting, participants exercised power/knowledge relationships with healthcare providers in increasingly assertive ways.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".