ABSTRACT
Digitalisation is profoundly shaping health care, including the operation of hospitals and other institutions and the practices of risk management and prevention. In this article, we draw on data from a project on so-called stem cell tourism (Petersen, Seear, & Munsie, 2014; Petersen, Tanner, & Munsie, 2015) to examine how patients may use digital media to gain access to clinically unproven – and hence potentially unsafe – treatments, namely stem cell treatments. Making reference to the plight of an Australian patient who travelled to Russia to undertake stem cell treatment and became a vocal patient activist for unproven stem cell treatments following a 60 Minutes television programme in 2014, and extensive related media coverage and online discussion, we illustrate the dynamic interplay of contending discourses of hope, risk and trust that characterise the era of digitalised health and help to define the architecture of ‘choice’ that consumers of new treatments increasingly are compelled to navigate. As we argue, digital media has provided patient activists with a powerful tool for framing the significance of treatments, especially when they are linked with more traditional media such as television. In the article, we discuss the implications of this growing media-enabled activism – for how individuals conceptualise ‘health’ and ‘risk’, and for approaches to regulating treatments
that are unproven and hence deemed ‘risky’. To set the scene, we begin by outlining the broad context of digitalised health and its impacts, before turning to details of our study.
Digitalisation, health and risk
