Case study of the use of the Internet in the democratization of international standards-making in the development of the new edition of the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) International Classification of Diseases (ICD)

Emma Whelan is a medical sociologist and associate professor in the Department of Sociology & Social Anthropology and the Gender & Women’s Studies Program, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Emma’s research focuses on how people make claims about health and illness. She has particular interests in pain and its representation, in ‘expert’ and ‘lay’ knowledges of health (and in how distinctions between them are drawn), and in attempts to standardize medical knowledge, particularly through classification. While at the Brocher Foundation, her main focus will be on the development of plans for a new study of the production of the 11th edition of the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases, and the use of a Web 2.0 platform by the WHO to encourage broad public participation in the process. She also will be writing up the results of a recent 4-year study of OxyContin, a prescription painkiller which has come to be seen as a drug of abuse, and the effects of OxyContin’s social problematisation on pain medicine and pain patients.