The Concordant Space of Biomedical Science: How individuals with Parkinson's disease synchronize themselves with clinical trials

Abstract

Parkinson’s disease (PD) becomes more frequent as populations grow older in western countries. Levodopa exists as medication, but is connected with side-effects. In search for an alternative therapy, patients become agents in different ways. The role as participant in clinical trials, not least, is one of these possibilities for lay influence in scientific matters. In this presentation we ask how one, as patient, relates to clinical science. How does one move along towards what one, on the basis of one’s degenerative illness, perceives as the progress of science? Individuals with PD are, in this sense, temporal beings in whatever they do or calculate in relation to science. In the presentation, based on an ethnographic fieldwork within the frames of a biomedical research project on cell transplantations, two different concepts – concordance and synchronizing – will be explored in terms of their analytical potential for understanding how research patients participate in clinical trials.