Malissa Kay Shaw

University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis

Menstrual products have long shaped how women manage their menstruating bodies and how menstruation is socially constructed. Historically, these products have simultaneously promoted messages of shame—menstruation is dirty and requires concealment—and modernity or have linked their use to overcoming the constraints of menstruation to become modern...

The Brief COPE Inventory has been proven as acceptable psychometric properties to examine coping strategies among cancer patients. However, most psychometric testing studies have been carried out in Western countries, raising concerns about the properties’ relevance and applicability in other cultural contexts. This study aimed to present psychomet...

Policy landscapes are instruments that identify national regulations on human genome editing (HGE). After examining their ethical and political assumptions, we highlight their limitations and effects for Latin America. We suggest creating other landscapes, such as focusing on processes and drawing attention to potential ‘circuits of use’ within and...

Over the past years, the field of regenerative medicine and cell therapy has garnered much interest, extending beyond the bench to broader use, and commercialization. These therapies undergo stringent regulatory oversight as a result of their complexities and potential risk across different jurisdictions. Taiwan’s government, with the aim of develo...

Analyses of assisted reproductive technologies have demonstrated how objectification and agency can coexist in infertility centers. How objectification creates opportunities for empowerment, however, has not yet been explored. In analyzing women's narratives of assisted conception in Colombian infertility clinics, I demonstrate the complexity in wo...

Background We assumed that patients in a country with lower economic development will have more psychological distress and problems than an economically stronger country. Therefore, the aims of this study were to determine whether advanced cancer patients in Indonesia have more psychological distress and experience more problems contributing to dis...

The purpose of this study was to test the mediating effects of coping on relationships of psychological distress and stress with anxiety, depression, and quality of life. A cross-sectional and correlational research study was used to recruit a sample of 440 patients with advanced cancer in Indonesia. A bootstrap resampling procedure was used to tes...

Background: Psychological distress is a common problem that occurs in advanced cancer patients; however, the concept has not been sufficiently specified or clearly described. Objective: To develop succinct understanding of psychological distress among advanced cancer patients. Methods: A literature search was conducted using the CINAHL, PubMed, a...

Medicine is a gendered discipline, in which women, both as patients and practitioners, have often held subordinate positions. The reproduction of dominant gender biases in the medical setting can negatively impact the professional development of medical students and the wellbeing of patients. In this analysis of medical students’ narratives of prof...

New biotechnologies such as assisted conception are socially embedded artefacts that raise context‐specific ethical, moral and social anxieties. In contexts where the regulations of these profitable developments are limited or ambiguous, and competition between private facilities is high, individual doctors become morally and socially responsible f...

Introduction Stem cell research (SCR) and the biomedical potential of developing therapies are crucial topics in biomedicine. Like other biotechnologies, stem cells are context specific entities understood through local conceptualisations of culture, politics, nationhood, as well as their perceived therapeutic efficacy. There is a need to recognise...

Resistance is classified as a reaction against confining social structures. During their education, medical students encounter traditional medical and interprofessional hierarchies as they learn to become doctors. These create a power disparity that may prevent their empowerment and ability to resist. Despite their subordinate position, students ar...

In this article, I explore how women undergoing in-vitro fertilization with familial or anonymous egg donors located relatedness with a donor-conceived child through familial and social identities. Recognizing gametes as substances that contain biological and sociocultural/behavioral traits, shaped women’s narratives around interconnected notions o...

Medical students often experience professionalism dilemmas (which differ from ethical dilemmas) wherein students sometimes witness and/or participate in patient safety, dignity, and consent lapses. When faced with such dilemmas, students make moral decisions. If students' action (or inaction) runs counter to their perceived moral values-often due t...

This thesis explores the processual nature of agency and constraints in the experience of medicalized conception in a not yet explored locale: Bogota, Colombia. In ten months of ethnographic research at two fertility centers in Bogota, and interview data from over 100 in-depth interviews with women and men undergoing ARTs and clinic staff, a comple...

Downregulation of normal gene expression in dying retinal ganglion cells has been documented in both acute and chronic models of optic nerve disease. The authors examined the mechanism and timing of this phenomenon in DBA/2J mice, using genetically modified substrains of this inbred line. DBA/2J mice, doubly congenic for the Bax mutant allele and t...

Some sort of infertility treatments, including the use of advanced reproductive technologies (ARTs), is nowadays pro- vided at several places in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, to date only a few studies have actually looked into the way these treatments are offered, used and experienced. In this review article the authors present and discuss empirical st...