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This article examines how Australian providers of unproven autologous 'stem cell treatments' legitimise these products and their practices. We focus on the strategies employed by providers in their efforts to create and sustain a market for procedures that have yet to be proven safe and clinically efficacious. Drawing on the work of Thomas Gieryn and Pierre Bourdieu and the findings of research involving an analysis of direct-to-consumer online advertising of clinics that sell purported 'stem cell treatments' and interviews with clinicians who provide them, we examine the mechanisms by which medical legitimacy for these products is established and defended. We argue that Australian providers employ a number of strategies in order to create medical legitimacy for the use and sale of scientifically unproven therapies. A key strategy employed by providers of stem cell treatments is to use markers of social distinction, drawing strongly on the symbols of science, to confirm their legitimacy and differentiate their own practices from those of other providers, who are posited as operating outside the boundary of accepted practice and hence illegitimate. We argue there is a paradox at the heart of the autologous stem cell treatment market. Providers aim to create legitimacy for their work by emphasising the potential benefits of their 'treatments', their expertise and the professionalisation of their practices in an environment where regulators are yet to take a firm stance; they are also required to undertake the challenging task of managing patients' hopes and expectations that both enable and potentially jeopardise their operations and revenue. We conclude by suggesting that providers' creation of symbolic capital to establish medical legitimacy is a crucial means by which they seek to bring unproven 'stem cell treatments' from the margins of medicine into the mainstream and to portray themselves as medical pioneers rather than medical cowboys who exploit vulnerable patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on in-depth interviews with gay men about their experiences and understanding of depression. It is a key outcome of the collaboration between social researchers, general practitioners and community partners to investigate the management of depression in gay men in primary care settings. As part of the qualitative arm of the project in-depth interviews were conducted with 40 gay men in Sydney and Adelaide (Australia). The approach to discourse analysis is informed by Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics. Six constructions of depression were identified: (1) depression as a constellation of symptoms; (2) symptoms constructed as experience; (3) depression as agent; (4) depression as mental processes; (5) not meeting social expectations; and (6) engaging with psychiatric discourse: constructing alternative positions. Gay men draw on the biomedical model of depression as low mood and loss of pleasure as well as on constructions of depression in terms of social experience. The biomedical model of depression is, however, not positioned as unproblematic. Rather, gay men align or disalign with this discourse according to their own experience, thereby enacting diverse masculinities. Gay men’s discourses of depression are inextricably linked to the community activism of gay men and their community organizations in the context of the HIV epidemic, as well as a synergy between gay men and their doctors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]