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Introduction
Frequent statements are now made in the medical and public health literature about an imminent revolution in healthcare, preventive medicine and public health driven by the use of new digital medical and health-related technologies, variously termed 'digital health', 'eHealth', Medicine 2.0' or 'Health 2.0'. In this literature, digital media technologies are described as contributing to a range of aspects of medicine and healthcare. These include the use of digitalised health information systems; the employment of wireless mobile digital devices and wearable, implanted or inserted biosensors for lay people to monitor their health, wellbeing and physical function and engage in self-care of illness, chronic medical conditions or disability remotely; conducting medical consultations via digital media; the use of digital technologies by lay people to seek out information about health, illness and medical treatments and therapies and to share their experiences and health-related data with others; the use of social media sites by healthcare providers to provide information about their services and interact with patients; the digitising of individuals' genomic sequencing data; and digital medical imaging.
Predictions of how these technologies will come to dominate in medical and public health as a means of delivering patient care, collecting and sharing medical and health-related data and bestowing responsibility upon lay people to manage their own health have proliferated. Digital health technologies are described as promoting communication between healthcare providers and patients, encouraging lay people to engage in preventive health activities and improving patient adherence to treatment protocols and their self-management of chronic diseases.
The rapid changes wrought by digital health technologies, particularly the newer technologies associated with Web 2.0 innovations, have only just begun to be documented and analysed in the academic critical social scientific literature. Most publications have been written from a largely uncritical preventive medical or health promotion perspective and adopt a techno-utopian perspective, tending to laud the possibilities of these technologies without acknowledging the social, ethical and political implications of their use. From a critical sociological perspective, however, a more in-depth and nuanced analysis may be undertaken of how these technologies may operate to construct various forms of subjectivities and embodiments and participate in the configuring and reproduction of power relations.
There is an extensive sociological literature that has addressed patient consumerism and medical...