Critical Discourses and Deliberations for 3D Printing in Medicine

• In Event: Digitised Medicine and Healthcare Practices

Abstract

This paper considers the challenge of enabling deliberative frameworks of governance in the distributed design, manufacture, and care required for 3D printing in medical practice. Crucially, it understands 3D printing as a socio-communicative set of practices tied to specific manufacturing technologies. Understanding the governance requirements that pervade this science-society-technology constellation is especially acute in the medical field; 3D prints trans-mediate human pathology and care through both the digital and physical in ways that offer novel treatments and over-bearing discourses of both peril and promise.

The paper focuses empirically on two sites for discourse analysis: The first seeks 'public knowledge’ about medical interventions involving 3D printing sourced through a Factiva search (Jan 2016-Jun 2017 of relevant terms, N:822) in Australia. The second targets the Therapeutic Goods Association’s 2017 consultation and discussion papers on 3D printing, as well as their resultant expert submissions.

While interpretation of data is ongoing, we offer a framework concerned with how Australia imagines and is forming its relations to current and emerging clinical practices that utilise nonbiological 3D printed objects. We hope to map public sentiments to the regulatory deliberation to consider how these debates a) are informed b) promise innovation in equality, efficiency, and effectiveness, and c) can afford rough consensus in relation to what are deeply personal politics. This is especially pertinent to science and technology studies as the political economies of medical practice transition from Evidence Based Medicine paradigms to those of Precision Medicine and DIY democratisation.

Authors

• luke heemsbergen, Deakin University

• Robert David Ewan Fordyce, The University of Melbourne