491 research outputs found
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The Competing Discourses of Care at the End of Life
This project details the nature of discourse and its consequences surrounding end of life care inside an emergency department and hospice. Detailing the way discourses organize meaning illustrates relationships between providers\u27 language use and care practices. At both sites, providers struggle to manage the tension of providing humanistic care in settings that are inherently routine and regulated. In this project, providers\u27 work practices transform to deal with this tension. As providers attempt to rehumanize care practices through language use, they ultimately tame death. Taming death allows providers to deal with the wildness and complexity of it but at the same time, taming death also tames and suppresses important conflicts and discussions from taking place. Even more, in taming death, meanings surrounding the culture of death became reproduced and naturalized thereby concealing them from critical engagement. Consequently, certain choices about how death should be handled and understood take priority over other choices and meanings that remain invisible or unspoken. Reopening choice and the way meaning around end of life is produced adds to current literature in several ways. The study contributes to theory and practice by (a) conceptualizing the everyday ways in which work practices and language influence end of life care, (b) detailing the role organizing processes play in the construction and organization of medical care around end of life, and (c) showing how reopening choice regarding meaning production is needed for education, policy, and practice
In vitro and in vivo validation of human and goat chondrocyte labeling by green fluorescent protein lentivirus transduction
We investigated whether human articular chondrocytes can be labeled efficiently and for long-term with a green fluorescent protein (GFP) lentivirus and whether the viral transduction would influence cell proliferation and tissue-forming capacity. The method was then applied to track goat articular chondrocytes after autologous implantation in cartilage defects. Expression of GFP in transduced chondrocytes was detected cytofluorimetrically and immunohistochemically. Chondrogenic capacity of chondrocytes was assessed by Safranin-O staining, immunostaining for type II collagen, and glycosaminoglycan content. Human articular chondrocytes were efficiently transduced with GFP lentivirus (73.4 +/- 0.5% at passage 1) and maintained the expression of GFP up to 22 weeks of in vitro culture after transduction. Upon implantation in nude mice, 12 weeks after transduction, the percentage of labeled cells (73.6 +/- 3.3%) was similar to the initial one. Importantly, viral transduction of chondrocytes did not affect the cell proliferation rate, chondrogenic differentiation, or tissue-forming capacity, either in vitro or in vivo. Goat articular chondrocytes were also efficiently transduced with GFP lentivirus (78.3 +/- 3.2%) and maintained the expression of GFP in the reparative tissue after orthotopic implantation. This study demonstrates the feasibility of efficient and relatively long-term labeling of human chondrocytes for co-culture on integration studies, and indicates the potential of this stable labeling technique for tracking animal chondrocytes for in cartilage repair studies
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