Regenerative Medicine, Unproven Therapies and the Framing of Clinical Risk

Abstract

This chapter analyses unorthodox narratives of clinical risk in regenerative medicine, namely, in the context of controversies over the provision of yet unproven stem cell therapies in the US and Italy. The public presentation of risk by patients and providers of unapproved therapies is premised on an extraordinary epistemology of clinical risk that, while departing from the ordinary framing of risk in medicine and medical experimentation, also bears complex continuities with the conceptual and symbolic world from which it seeks to separate. Far from simply manifesting the clash of rationality and unruliness, this ambiguity brings into view how moral difference is produced, reproduced and challenged through the lived experience of disease in contemporary medical practices.