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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The current case in the spotlight is Baby Joseph Maraachli. He suffers from a “progressively deteriorating neurological condition” of unknown origin and is in a permanent vegetative state. He is 13 months old. A court in Ontario ruled that the health center treating Baby Joseph could remove the breathing tube keeping him alive. The parents have transferred the child to a hospital in St. Louis, where he will receive a tracheotomy.
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By
Jan -
February 26, 2011
Thaddeus Pope quotes this sentence from a 1988 letter to the editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.
“It seems we have lost sight of the difference between patients who die because their hearts stop and patients whose hearts stop because they are dying.”
Today we no longer stop to make that distinction.
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By
Jan -
February 3, 2011
The New Yorker published a beautiful piece by Joyce Carol Oates on the death of her husband, Raymond Smith. Oates and Smith, who had been married 48 years, were in a car accident three years ago. The engine of their car was struck at high impact from the side, and their airbags inflated. Both Oates and Smith walked away from the scene, feeling lucky to be alive.
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By
Jan -
January 13, 2011
GM chickens created that could prevent the spread of bird flu (Guardian)
Genetically modified chickens can still catch the flu, but their “decoy” molecules confuse the replication cycle of viruses. Technique could also be applied to pigs
Blogs encouraging suicides in the gay community (KevinMD)
Suicide is contagious among the young. Is the blogosphere contributing to and encouraging a recent suicide epidemic among young gays?
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Deadly Images (Slate)
Interview with author of “About To Die: How News Images Move the Public.” Images of the dead push viewers away, but news images of impending death are “effective.”
Where will new drugs come from? (Lancet)
Not from drug companies. Some suggestions on what can be done, but outlook is not good.
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By
Jan -
December 31, 2010
Health is an ideology: a set of ideas that establishes goals, creates expectations, and determines our actions. An ideology provides a way to understand the world and ourselves. It’s only natural that we want to exert control over our health, our susceptibility to illness, the length of our lives. Our anxiety about health – amplified by constant discussion in all available media – makes us vulnerable to the latest promise of the rewards of a healthy lifestyle. The obsessive pursuit of health, however, is itself unhealthy.
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By
Jan -
November 8, 2010
It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck. To fall prey to a motor neuron disease is surely to have offended the Gods at some point, and there is nothing more to be said. But if you must suffer thus, better to have a well-stocked head.
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By
Jan -
October 30, 2010
In one of the best scenes of the episode, medical professionals are standing by in the operating room, ready to receive the organs that are about to be removed. Chief Resident Miranda Bailey — my favorite character (played by Chandra Wilson) — is emotionally distraught at the loss of George. She asks for information about the destination of the eyes, the liver, the heart. The details of the organ donations – the benefits they will bring to the particular children and adults who have been waiting and hoping for this opportunity – are quite moving.
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By
Jan -
September 20, 2010
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is in the process of revising the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) – the psychiatrist’s bible. Its last incarnation — known as DSM IV — was published in 2000. The new version will be DSM V. … One item in dispute is whether bereavement – the grieving process that follows the loss of a loved one – might qualify a patient for the DSM label Major Depressive Episode.
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I have no idea where I’ll be next month. I could be silent. I could be dead. I could be exactly like this. I could be in a variety of stages. But I know, absolutely with certainty – within reason – that I’ll be dead in five years. And that reversal of consciousness means that I am very focused upon life in the next two weeks.
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Between those late 19th century discussions of euthanasia as mercy killing and 1975, when Balfour Mount introduced the term palliative care, there was no name for supportive care of the dying. Without a name, there could be no specialists in the subject, no professors to teach it, no training for physicians. There was little discussion of the subject in medical schools. Without a name, the subject could not be indexed and researched in medical literature. There could be no advances in knowledge or improvement in techniques.
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“Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?” he asked from his wheelchair.
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The vocal muscle, for sixty years my reliable alter ego, is failing. Communication, performance, assertion: these are now my weakest assets. Translating being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.
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[O]ur responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once. They have no experience to draw upon. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come—and to escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want.
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Considering the two wars were declared and waged with scant attention to their full costs, lawmakers add insult to injury by invoking budget concerns for the traumatic needs of actual warriors.
… “The real question is, why don’t we care anymore?”
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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.
