![]() ![]() ![]() We question the increasingly common ways in which risk becomes an all-encompassing diagnosis in the personalized medicine era. Extending this scholarship, our paper considers how ‘risk’ is transformed into a health state within genomics. Research also establishes the multiple motivations behind actors’ medicalization of certain diagnoses, such as moralization, stigma, or strategic metrics. Existing research explores how both lay and expert actors mobilize, often at odds, to medicalize or resist diagnostic conditions. Through augmented access to genetic data, consumers are often left with perceptions of ever-present health risk and must muddle through the unsettled terrain of genetic diagnostics and interventions. Within the genomics revolution, direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic technologies are transforming what it means to be ‘healthy.’ In “recreational genetics”, individuals can purchase a DNA kit for a modest sum, mail in a swab of their cheek cells (or another source of genetic data), and receive a detailed report of their genetic identity past, present, and future. However, heightened technological insight does not always entail increased health certainty uncertainty features prominently in the making of medicalization and continued ‘need’ for technological advancement. These factors enable increased participation in a medicalized worldview in which genetic biomarkers can inform understandings of our physical existence, health futures, and life choices. It also brings democratized access to technology for lay patients. In addition to other transformations, personalized medicine uplifts the genomic scientist, who plays a critical role in developing technologies and influencing clinicians to implement products and analyses. We refer to this as ‘personalized’ or ‘precision’ medicine, wherein genetic knowledge plays a partial yet indispensable role. Medical advancements have steered increasingly toward personalized understandings of the human condition. ![]() Since the inception of the Human Genome Project (1990–2003), an endeavor to map the genetic composition of human DNA, medicine has undergone a dramatic reorientation. By showing how the uncertain nature of genomics serves as a productive force placing both parties within a mutually cooperative cycle, we argue that experts and patient-consumers co-produce a form of relational medicalization that concretizes “risk” itself as a disease state. ![]() Harnessing ethnographic observations at five conferences and a text -analysis of 52 Reddit threads, we find both experts and lay patient-consumers navigate their own versions of “productive uncertainty.” Experts develop genetic technologies to legitimize unsettled genomics as medical knowledge and mobilize resources and products, while lay patient-consumers turn to Internet forums to gain clarity on knowledge gaps that help better manage their genetic risk states. Given increased prevalence of direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic health tests in recent years, this paper delves into discourses among researchers at professional genomics conferences and lay DTC genetic test users on popular discussion website Reddit to understand the contested value of genetic knowledge and its direct implications for health management. ![]()
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