Why do we choose the Internet instead of the doctor next door? The Internet as a site for medicines in grey zones is an interdisciplinary research project at Lund University. The project is funded by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg foundation. It is a collaboration between Ethnology and Information studies.
The digital medical arena is complex, and this might make it difficult for people to grasp which sites provide non-genuine medical goods. We refer to such empirical and legally blurred settings as grey zones, and we refer to the products that circulate in these fields as grey zone medicines. The project takes the specific and unexplored situation in Sweden as an empirical case. We intend to expand knowledge about what pushes the digital medical grey zones. We aim at advancing theory by demonstrating the necessity of combining sociocultural andsociotechnical analyses.