MCL GRAND ROUNDS - 11:30AM PT
Challenging Allergies: The Search for a Magic Bullet for Pediatric Food Allergies
Food allergies have been on the rise over the past twenty years, and they have become an important area of medical research and pharmaceutical development. In this talk, Dr. Fisher will discuss her new book project that focuses on how families pursue a form of “medicalized normalcy” for their children as they seek medical interventions to treat food allergies. The project is based on what began as an ethnographic study of food allergy clinical trials and expanded to include semi-structured interviews with practicing allergists and families who had never pursued a clinical trial for their children. The talk will focus on how clinical trials and other food allergy treatments are a form of biomedicalization that exposes children to exceptional, and sometimes traumatic, interventions that parents justify through the elusive “normal" life and future they envision for them.
Jill Fisher
Jill A. Fisher, Ph.D., is Professor of Social Medicine and core faculty in the UNC Center for Bioethics. Dr. Fisher is a social scientist with a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and expertise in medical sociology and research ethics. Her scholarship and teaching interests center upon how social inequalities are produced or exploited by commercialized medicine in the United States. Dr. Fisher has published three books and over 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She is the recipient of over $5 million in funding as principal investigator or co-principal investigator on grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).