Book

I am currently writing my first academic book: Gaming Health: How Doctors and Patients Weigh Chance and Risk in Commodified Care.

This book is about how medical providers and patients wager resources on technologies and techniques in the hope of improving health, but with uncertain outcomes that are determined, to some degree, by chance. I argue that medical providers strategically attend to particular risks to motivate medical decisions and behavior.

Gaming Health centers twins related to fertility treatment as a critical case for interrogating how patients and providers negotiate risk and chance.

This book is based on ethnographic observations of patient-provider consults at three different fertility clinics with distinct characteristics and perspectives on the risk of twins: Boutique Clinic, Budget Clinic, and University Clinic. I observed hundreds of consults at the three clinics. I also conducted over 100 interviews with people who pursued fertility treatment and fertility providers.

Gaming Health lays new groundwork in medical sociology in portraying how medical providers convince patients that treatments represent a good investment in the context of consumer medicine