The Legal Transformation of Medicine: How Rules Work in the International World of HIV/AIDS
Author: Carol A. Heimer
This book project braids together investigations of three transformative events — the “legalization” and globalization of medicine and the advent of HIV/AIDS — in a study of how laws, regulations and other rules are actually used in HIV research and treatment in the United States, Uganda, South Africa, and Thailand. It investigates what happens when laws, regulations, and guidelines, admittedly created with the best of intentions, are transported to new sites where they confront the realities of medical care, clinical research, and healthcare administration in 19 developing countries. Impacts include resource shortages, desperate patients, culturally-based miscommunications about ethical principles, discrepancies between first-world research designs and third-world research settings, as well as the mundane uncertainties typical of the encounter between medicine and human biology.