ABSTRACT
Healthcare service providing centers in India offer contentious stem cell-based therapies to patients for an array of medical conditions. Among strategies these centers adopt to recruit new patients from local, regional and global spheres, the most prominent is the use of “recruiter-patients.” Recruiter-patients are a group of patients who either have already received or are in the process of receiving the therapy and, importantly, are used by service providers as mediums or tools to attract desperate yet novice therapy seeking patients to the ambit of the stem cell therapy enterprise. This article is based on a multi-sited ethnographic study at stem cell-based therapy providing centers in different parts of India between July 2008 and June 2009. Using the concepts of “bionetworking” and “ambiguous symbols,” this article explores how recruiter-patients are used by service providers as tools for the recruitment of new patients and why they are effective.
