ArticleSociology of health & illness2025
Healthism and Digital Self-Tracking: Reinventing the Individualistic Ethos in Chile.
Article in Sociology of health & illness, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Developing an animation-based mental health measure for children and young people.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Healthism and Digital Self-Tracking: Reinventing the Individualistic Ethos in Chile.Sociology of health & illness · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
This article examines how digital self-tracking practices (DSTPs) reconfigure the individualistic ethos of healthism through a posthumanist onto-epistemological shift. Healthism, originally formulated by Robert Crawford in 1980, refers to an ideology that prioritises individual health as the foundation of well-being, promoting self-management through lifestyle choices and placing responsibility on individuals. Based on 23 interviews with users of insulin pumps and fitness applications in Chile, this study employs a critical thematic analysis informed by Science and Technology Studies. Findings show that DSTPs reproduce and transform the logic of healthism, reinforcing responsibility while reshaping the conditions under which health is known and managed. Insulin pumps embed users in tightly regulated medical regimes, whereas fitness applications foster gamified self-optimisation and promote competition. Both technologies intensify the individualistic ethos while displacing introspection with data-driven knowledge. This highlights a crucial paradox: DSTPs legitimise themselves through discourses that deny the very power of discourse, elevating numbers as the only credible source of truth. Thus, the digital subject is caught between the demand to 'know thyself' and the recognition that such knowledge depends on technologies that both empower and constrain it.
Indexed as
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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.