Medicine Anthropology Theory
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Exploring and articulating a critical suicidology: \u27Suicidology\u27s cultural turn, and beyond\u27
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Exigencies in the field: Shifting social, political, and theoretical realities of health research in Niger
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Ordinary medicine: The power and confusion of evidence
Get PDFMedicine in the twenty-first century is constituted and propelled by the production of evidence. Once produced, the use of that evidence is complicated by features inherent in the American and global biomedical economy itself. With the exponential rise in the use of cardiac devices as my case study, this think piece traces the links among evidence-based medicine, insurance reimbursement policies, and clinical trial outcomes to reveal how evidence produced by trial findings creates treatment standards. Those standards, in turn, expand what is thought to be ‘treatable’ by reconceptualizing risk as a condition that deserves intervention. Such standards affect what physicians recommend and what patients decide to do. The essay emphasizes that evidence-based medicine can be a source of anxiety that patients and families feel when considering how to proceed. It highlights the debates, increasingly common both within and beyond the health professions, about what is actually best as we grow older. It provides an example of how, today, most deaths, even among the very old, are considered premature. In an aging society, the treatment protocols that fall under the evidence-based medicine umbrella constitute an enormous truth-making regime that determines the goals of medicine and shapes health care consumers’ quandaries about medical intervention, and especially the quandary, for those in later life, about crossing the line of too much treatment
De machinemens: De machinemetafoor in de geneeskunde en in het denken over ziekte en gezondheid
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addicted.pregnant.poor
Get PDFaddicted.pregnant.poor is an ethnography addressing the biomedical, social, political, and ethical dimensions of ongoing illicit drug use during pregnancy. A result of four years of fieldwork in daily-rent hotels – privately owned buildings in which the exploitation of women’s sex work and on-going poor health was normative – the book follows nineteen women who had twenty-three pregnancies. To answer the question ‘What forms of life are possible here?’ I engaged with the social actors who are called upon to produce knowledge about addicted pregnancy, including addicted, pregnant women; an anthropologist; public health epidemiologists; advocates; social policymakers; treatment professionals; bureaucrats; and scientists. In this essay, I describe the relationship between the scientific contours of reproductive health and the personal and social consequences of pregnancy in the context of addiction and housing instability. Pregnant women in the daily-rent hotels existed within multiple temporalities. Here I explore what an ethnographic understanding of memorial time and biomedical time can teach us about the vital politics of viability at work in addicted pregnancy