By
Jan -
February 20, 2012
Our financially and professionally entrenched system of medical care has a vested interest in maintaining an understanding of health that preserves the status quo. Part of the power of our biomedical culture is that its contingency – the very real possibility that it could be different — is ordinarily invisible to us. What would it take to imagine a widely shared understanding of health that called for dramatic changes not only in how our health care needs are met, but in the conditions under which we live our lives? This is the question that I hope an examination of healthism will provoke.
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Categories:
Aging Dying & Death,
Arts & Media,
Health & Medicine -
Tags: health care, healthism, healthy lifestyles, history of medicine, inequality, lifestyle, medicalization, overdiagnosis, politics, social determinants of health2 Comments -
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By
Jan -
February 20, 2012
Throughout history there’s been an understandable desire to find connections between our behavior and our health. Human beings have practiced health regimens involving diet, exercise and hygiene since antiquity. When medicine was based on the humoral theory of disease, for example, individuals were advised to purge the body in the spring and, in the summer, avoid foods or activities that caused heat. Bathing in ice water was recommended in the 19th century. Mark Twain quoted the advice: “the only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d druther not.”
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Categories:
Health & Medicine,
History of Medicine,
Politics & Issues -
Tags: health care, healthism, healthy lifestyles, history of medicine, inequality, lifestyle, overdiagnosis, politics, social determinants of health9 Comments -
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By
Jan -
February 19, 2012
When a medical clinician examines a patient, she first determines the presenting symptoms, considers which bodily functions might account for those symptoms, arrives at a diagnosis, and provides the most appropriate treatment. But what if the presenting symptom is depression? As Alain Ehrenberg points out, “depression, like any mental illness, is not a disease that can be assigned to a part of the body.” In fact, as Ehrenberg goes on to say: “when psychiatry can discover the cause of a mental illness, as happened with epilepsy, it is no longer a mental illness.” Such has been the dilemma of the history of psychiatry.
Continue Reading »
Our financially and professionally entrenched system of medical care has a vested interest in maintaining an understanding of health that preserves the status quo. Part of the power of our biomedical culture is that its contingency – the very real possibility that it could be different — is ordinarily invisible to us. What would it take to imagine a widely shared understanding of health that called for dramatic changes not only in how our health care needs are met, but in the conditions under which we live our lives? This is the question that I hope an examination of healthism will provoke.
