3 bits of news for today's update.
1. My ex-lover (I become increasingly dissatisfied with the singular 'ex') left a voicemail on my phone yesterday whilst at work. It was long, and gentle, and thoughtful and hinged around the observation: 'once so close, now so far...' For those not in the know, just before I went skiing, I told her, as we sat talking over tea at her place, that I missed her, and that I thought that the lack of communication around which our break-up hinged, was almost certainly related to the profound grief that I was suffering at the time... She, however, felt that we should have broken up much earlier. Of course, she didn't tell me at the time. And not to save me, she revealed, but because she just didn't want to talk about it... She now has some 'other guys' that she's interested in... Lucky her. And she wonders why we're no longer so close. I need space. In fact, that should go on my epitaph list...
here lies addie.
he needed space.
****
2. I got my dissertation title approved! Of course, it is bound to alter somewhat over the next few months, but as it stands, it's kinds sexy. Geeky, but sexy. Behold:
Systems of Embodied Knowledge: Tradition in Brazilian Capoeira and the Effects of Crosscultural Interchange
****
3. The same professor who helped finalise the above piece of beautiful bullshit (who happens to rank rather highly on my current idol list - she's just so damn cool!) bullied me into finally handing in last semester's paper next week... It was, in case you've all forgotten (I would), a response to the question
In what sense is it claimed that patients and doctors negotiate the "reality" that brings them together?
I wrote it during the period in which I was breaking up with the lady of point 1, and still coping with Dan's sudden death, so, as I try to re-edit now, I find many things that I had forgotten ever writing, let alone researching... And as I read through it, I'm discovering some interesting bits and bobs. Thus, to avoid the rewriting of the final couple of paragraphs that I should be doing, I thought I'd share some with you...
Hope you're all (s)well;
and I send out love to those who deserve it
... right now...
The popularly conceived authority and infallibility of objective scientific knowledge, and the ideological faith in diagnostic reasoning that underpins so much of Western biomedical culture in turn authorizes the medical practitioner, as representative of the biomedical system, to diagnose, classify, and generally deal with people on behalf of society at large (Brown 1995:39). It has further been suggested by both Zola (1972) and Illich (1975) that the progressive medicalization of modern society - perceived predominantly in the continuing development and growth of medical technology and knowledge - expands the boundaries of the health care system to include more and more problems traditionally located in other cultural systems thereby resulting in the increasing use of biomedicine for purposes of social control (Kleinman 1980:40).
footnote attached:
In defence of the potential paranoid implications of such a conclusion, consider Phil Browns observation that, for socially powerful groups and institutions, diagnosis can be a tool for social control, such as the medical labelling of homosexuality as mental illness. Our conception of medicalization ... involves social control at very routine levels of socialization, labelling of behaviour, and prescriptions for medical intervention. Diagnosis is central to such control, since giving the name has often been the starting point for social labelers (1995:39).
****
[and some of my best friends are medics... no accounting for taste!]
Whether we follow Parsons (1951) in locating the technical knowledge of the physician as the cause, or Friedson (1970) in highlighting the structural arrangements in society, both draw attention to the exclusion of the patient from the diagnostic process (Perakyla 1998:301-2), thereby highlighting the hierarchic nature of the clinical reality that they supposedly share. It is an unbalanced arrangement expressed in the control of knowledge between the professional physician and the lay patient. Indeed, shockingly, both Sontag (1983 [1977]:11), in consideration of France and Italy, and Glaser (1966:83), of Britain and America, attest to the proclivity amongst doctors towards withholding the communication of terminal, and especially cancerous diagnoses to patients. Similarly, however, it is the tendency for patients to relinquish or subordinate their knowledge and opinion of their problem, thereby submitting willingly to the authority of biomedical knowledge as the objective, scientific, and factual assessment of [their] condition (Perakyla 1998:303). As is often the case with hegemonic ideologies, the subaltern - in this case the patient - is conditioned to accept the apparent superiority and authority of the dominant group - i.e. the biomedical practitioner - without question. As is also the case in such social arrangements, there is minimal conscious awareness of this. The body, to the biomedical gaze, is an object, and it is a system of perception that the patient buys into; that is, when it comes to illness and the body, the doctor knows best.
****
[it seems that even 'being sick' might not be so simple!]
Whilst the medical encounter might seem to materialize as a response to an impairment of an individuals well-being, such concepts are in fact already the product of the medical system.
****
[Is this like sociological paranoia?!]
The various technological developments that have brought colour-enhanced killer T cells and intimate photographs of the developing foetus (Haraway 1991:209) into high-gloss coffee-table art books, magazines, and television documentaries, have also contributed to shaping our cultural beliefs and understandings of bodily terrain, and thus of our biomedical expectations. They have helped in the social conception of the immune system, that elaborate icon for principal systems of symbolic and material difference in late capitalism (op.cit.:204); of our disembodied perceptual models of blood cells and organ functions; of colour-coded explanations of debilitating and consumptive diseases of the brain.
This technological revelation of the internal cosmos of the body now presents our flesh as a potentially opaque screen that may conceal the abnormal, destructive development of disease and illness (cf. Sontag 1983 [1977]:67). Small pains could signify so much more; our mutinous bodies might harbour potential revolt, and they may do so without our knowledge. We have been made aware that there is more going on within us than we can possibly imagine, let alone know, and it requires the mysterious, technological procedures of tissue analysis and the various, colonially-tinged mapping and scanning techniques of biotechnology to render our rebellious flesh transparent; to make us known to ourselves through the revealing lens of biomedicine (op.cit.:17).
****
[This makes me laugh]
In reaffirming the subaltern status of the patient, Heath also notes that, in defiance of the ordinary moral obligation to cease to inflict pain on another, which is suspended in the medical encounter, the doctor is, in fact, uniquely sanctioned to do so in order to generate a solution to the patients difficulties (1989:116). And the patients vocalized, non-verbal response to such suffering (i.e. a cry of pain) is designed to preserve the diagnostic investigations at hand and assist the practitioners attempts to locate the source of the difficulty. ... [The patient] designs the cry to reveal the pain and cooperate with the specific investigations, but not to compel the recipient to specifically attend the actual suffering (op.cit.:123).
****
Doctors! Heh!
****
Oh yes. And to the one or two out there:
(yep: I really do this...)
1. My ex-lover (I become increasingly dissatisfied with the singular 'ex') left a voicemail on my phone yesterday whilst at work. It was long, and gentle, and thoughtful and hinged around the observation: 'once so close, now so far...' For those not in the know, just before I went skiing, I told her, as we sat talking over tea at her place, that I missed her, and that I thought that the lack of communication around which our break-up hinged, was almost certainly related to the profound grief that I was suffering at the time... She, however, felt that we should have broken up much earlier. Of course, she didn't tell me at the time. And not to save me, she revealed, but because she just didn't want to talk about it... She now has some 'other guys' that she's interested in... Lucky her. And she wonders why we're no longer so close. I need space. In fact, that should go on my epitaph list...
here lies addie.
he needed space.
****
2. I got my dissertation title approved! Of course, it is bound to alter somewhat over the next few months, but as it stands, it's kinds sexy. Geeky, but sexy. Behold:
Systems of Embodied Knowledge: Tradition in Brazilian Capoeira and the Effects of Crosscultural Interchange
****
3. The same professor who helped finalise the above piece of beautiful bullshit (who happens to rank rather highly on my current idol list - she's just so damn cool!) bullied me into finally handing in last semester's paper next week... It was, in case you've all forgotten (I would), a response to the question
In what sense is it claimed that patients and doctors negotiate the "reality" that brings them together?
I wrote it during the period in which I was breaking up with the lady of point 1, and still coping with Dan's sudden death, so, as I try to re-edit now, I find many things that I had forgotten ever writing, let alone researching... And as I read through it, I'm discovering some interesting bits and bobs. Thus, to avoid the rewriting of the final couple of paragraphs that I should be doing, I thought I'd share some with you...
Hope you're all (s)well;
and I send out love to those who deserve it
... right now...
The popularly conceived authority and infallibility of objective scientific knowledge, and the ideological faith in diagnostic reasoning that underpins so much of Western biomedical culture in turn authorizes the medical practitioner, as representative of the biomedical system, to diagnose, classify, and generally deal with people on behalf of society at large (Brown 1995:39). It has further been suggested by both Zola (1972) and Illich (1975) that the progressive medicalization of modern society - perceived predominantly in the continuing development and growth of medical technology and knowledge - expands the boundaries of the health care system to include more and more problems traditionally located in other cultural systems thereby resulting in the increasing use of biomedicine for purposes of social control (Kleinman 1980:40).
footnote attached:
In defence of the potential paranoid implications of such a conclusion, consider Phil Browns observation that, for socially powerful groups and institutions, diagnosis can be a tool for social control, such as the medical labelling of homosexuality as mental illness. Our conception of medicalization ... involves social control at very routine levels of socialization, labelling of behaviour, and prescriptions for medical intervention. Diagnosis is central to such control, since giving the name has often been the starting point for social labelers (1995:39).
****
[and some of my best friends are medics... no accounting for taste!]
Whether we follow Parsons (1951) in locating the technical knowledge of the physician as the cause, or Friedson (1970) in highlighting the structural arrangements in society, both draw attention to the exclusion of the patient from the diagnostic process (Perakyla 1998:301-2), thereby highlighting the hierarchic nature of the clinical reality that they supposedly share. It is an unbalanced arrangement expressed in the control of knowledge between the professional physician and the lay patient. Indeed, shockingly, both Sontag (1983 [1977]:11), in consideration of France and Italy, and Glaser (1966:83), of Britain and America, attest to the proclivity amongst doctors towards withholding the communication of terminal, and especially cancerous diagnoses to patients. Similarly, however, it is the tendency for patients to relinquish or subordinate their knowledge and opinion of their problem, thereby submitting willingly to the authority of biomedical knowledge as the objective, scientific, and factual assessment of [their] condition (Perakyla 1998:303). As is often the case with hegemonic ideologies, the subaltern - in this case the patient - is conditioned to accept the apparent superiority and authority of the dominant group - i.e. the biomedical practitioner - without question. As is also the case in such social arrangements, there is minimal conscious awareness of this. The body, to the biomedical gaze, is an object, and it is a system of perception that the patient buys into; that is, when it comes to illness and the body, the doctor knows best.
****
[it seems that even 'being sick' might not be so simple!]
Whilst the medical encounter might seem to materialize as a response to an impairment of an individuals well-being, such concepts are in fact already the product of the medical system.
****
[Is this like sociological paranoia?!]
The various technological developments that have brought colour-enhanced killer T cells and intimate photographs of the developing foetus (Haraway 1991:209) into high-gloss coffee-table art books, magazines, and television documentaries, have also contributed to shaping our cultural beliefs and understandings of bodily terrain, and thus of our biomedical expectations. They have helped in the social conception of the immune system, that elaborate icon for principal systems of symbolic and material difference in late capitalism (op.cit.:204); of our disembodied perceptual models of blood cells and organ functions; of colour-coded explanations of debilitating and consumptive diseases of the brain.
This technological revelation of the internal cosmos of the body now presents our flesh as a potentially opaque screen that may conceal the abnormal, destructive development of disease and illness (cf. Sontag 1983 [1977]:67). Small pains could signify so much more; our mutinous bodies might harbour potential revolt, and they may do so without our knowledge. We have been made aware that there is more going on within us than we can possibly imagine, let alone know, and it requires the mysterious, technological procedures of tissue analysis and the various, colonially-tinged mapping and scanning techniques of biotechnology to render our rebellious flesh transparent; to make us known to ourselves through the revealing lens of biomedicine (op.cit.:17).
****
[This makes me laugh]
In reaffirming the subaltern status of the patient, Heath also notes that, in defiance of the ordinary moral obligation to cease to inflict pain on another, which is suspended in the medical encounter, the doctor is, in fact, uniquely sanctioned to do so in order to generate a solution to the patients difficulties (1989:116). And the patients vocalized, non-verbal response to such suffering (i.e. a cry of pain) is designed to preserve the diagnostic investigations at hand and assist the practitioners attempts to locate the source of the difficulty. ... [The patient] designs the cry to reveal the pain and cooperate with the specific investigations, but not to compel the recipient to specifically attend the actual suffering (op.cit.:123).
****
Doctors! Heh!
****
Oh yes. And to the one or two out there:
(yep: I really do this...)
VIEW 8 of 8 COMMENTS
Probably mid week then? Wed or Thurs is good for me. I'll be around Bond St, Soho, Tott Crt Rd from 6pm both days. Good for you?
Interestingly enough I diagnosed three new cases of gayness last week.
And we do keep all the best drugs for ourselves. You just get the cheapest ones (or none at all if you have breast cancer....).