ArticleMedical anthropology quarterly2021
Like a Grinding Stone: How Crowdfunding Platforms Create, Perpetuate, and Value Health Inequities.
Article in Medical anthropology quarterly, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- Health inequities in medical crowdfunding: a systematic review.International journal for equity in health · 2025Pooled it
- Paying for precision: funding approaches for N-of-1 trials of individualized gene targeted therapies.Orphanet journal of rare diseases · 2026Review
- Assessing the Importance of Content Versus Design for Successful Crowdfunding of Health Education Games: Online Survey Study.JMIR serious games · 2024Article
- The Use of Medical Crowdfunding to Mitigate the Personal Costs of Serious Chronic Illness: Scoping Review.Journal of medical Internet research · 2023Article
- Racial and gender disparities among highly successful medical crowdfunding campaigns.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2023Article
- Doing 'our bit': Solidarity, inequality, and COVID-19 crowdfunding for the UK National Health Service.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2022Article
- An overview of Fintech applications to solve the puzzle of health care funding: state-of-the-art in medical crowdfunding.Financial innovation · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
This article explores how inequities are reproduced by, and valued within, the increasingly ubiquitous world of medical crowdfunding. As patients use platforms like GoFundMe to solicit donations for health care, success stories inundate social media. But most crowdfunders experience steep odds and marginal benefits. Drawing on the problematic figure of the "black box" in health disparities research and technology studies, I offer ethnography as a tool for unpacking often inscrutable and complex pathways through which online platforms amplify inequities. By leveraging both online and traditional research strategies-a platform analysis and paired narratives of crowdfunders' disparate experiences, drawn from open-ended interviews-this article explores how inequities are created and experienced by users. The analysis highlights how inequities are simultaneously central to the functioning of this marketplace and occluded by its platform design. Consequently, crowdfunding is concealing health inequities while shifting public values about who is entitled to health care, and why.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.