“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil"

Death should not be a surprising concept; everyone that has ever lived has died, and everyone alive today will die before the next 150 years have passed. Despite all religious and spiritual attempts to create a path towards a gentle death and convince us that everything will be all right, most people fear death. We are especially uncomfortable with an untimely demise because we have plans for our life: we have places to be and things to do. And Americans in particular have grown attached to their material selves, with what they feel makes them human. With all of our sentimentality towards the concept of life, and our unlimited history of dealing with death, it seems strange that we have a difficult time determining where life ceases. In different places and different times humans have (and perhaps always will) define the point of death in drastically different ways. Western medicine wants to reassure us that it can call an absolute time of death and tell us when our loved ones have ceased to exist, but the very history of the development of biomedicine tells us that we may never be so sure. And so we remain afraid of the unknown.

The mysteries of the physical body have been explored for hundreds of years. Public autopsies and dissections of corpses were common in the fourteenth century, while western medicine was learning about human anatomy, but the life saving knowledge that was gained during this time was not considerable. There were no instances of patients being brought back from the accidental brink of death, and no miracle treatments were discovered. “In 1786 Edmund Goodwyn of London received the Humane Society gold medal for his dissertation on the connection between life and respiration” (Lock 2002: 58). Before the 1930’s, people who stopped being able to breathe as a result of a massive chest injury simply died and there was nothing that scientists could do to help them. But “from the middle of the nineteenth century, numerous “breathing machines” were built…permitting the lungs, even when damaged, to continue their work of supplying oxygen to the bloodstream” (Ibid. 58). Around this same time it was discovered that hearts could occasionally be ‘restarted’, so lack of a heartbeat could no longer be said to determine absolute death. Science made discoveries before the 1930s that stopped death in its tracks, with the advent of vaccines, etc. However, inventions like the iron lung ventilator and electrical paddles to recharge the heart created a new field for the practice of medicine: intensive care. Doctors not only stitched up open wounds and reset broken bones, but they were now capable of staging a direct battle against the loss of human life. And the society that feared death rejoiced.

Even as we marveled at medicine’s power to save lives, a particularly observant bystander would have noticed a tension and a shift in our thinking about death. As Lock states in Twice Dead, “biological death has always been recognized on the basis of changes to the body that are judged irreversible; this is not new, but the use of the ventilator means that the process of bodily dying can be extended for increasing periods, very occasionally for years” (Ibid. 41). As new technologies to prevent death have arisen, so has our idea of what diagnoses are equivalent to a death sentence. At one time a death sentence was the word polio, but no one dies of polio anymore, thanks to modern medicine. At one point, it was the words severe asthma, but we have drugs and ventilators nowadays. And we have most recently done away with death by heart attack. When your heart runs out, doctors can replace it with a new one. But this latest definition of the death sentence has caused us to reconsider, once again, when the point of death occurs. If not death by disease or accidental damage to vital organs, what can take away our humanity? The latest answer that the west has presented is brain death. We can replace nearly every part of the body with a newer, better functioning machine or organ, but we cannot (yet) replace brains.

As with all death sentences, the words brain death come with a considerable amount of baggage, because a patient’s body no longer needs to cease functioning for them to be declared “dead”. With the advent of successful organ transplantation and living corpses all in the same century, doctors began to realize from where the organs for their new transplant surgeries must come. “Patients with a diagnosis of ‘irreversible coma’, as this condition was originally termed, would probably not have received much medical attention were it not for the simultaneous development of biotechnologies permitting solid organ transplants in humans” (Ibid. 64). We needed to declare brain death so that we could use the good organs within the living corpses to save lives. This practice was quickly legalized, in the United States at least, but transplant patients soon came to realize that they were not just receiving their own treatment anymore and would soon be in possession of a part of someone else’s body. (Indeed, the reason that most transplant patients were receiving organs in the first place was because families of the dead often wish for some part of their loved ones to continue meaning something.) Patients realized that they would not be losing their humanity through death, but that they would be made up of people that were not themselves. Sharp’s Bodies, Commodities and Biotechnologies discusses how “Prospective patients…overwhelmingly express a preference for mechanical parts…” (Sharp 2007: 89). They feel that to be melded with an animal could cause them to change somehow, taking on characteristics of the donor organ. It surprises me that the danger of losing ones humanity is associated less with machines than other living creatures. Do we believe that bionic machines have more humanity than people?

The difficulty that we have with life and death has everything to do with reluctance to lose our humanity. We have determined that brain death is real death because the patient will never be the same, functioning human again. It seems strange, then, that we feel no qualms about replacing parts of our bodies with material objects that have no relation to our humanity. We fear death to such an extent that we are willing to become less of our old selves to escape it, but at the same time we must maintain enough of our old body (namely our brain) that we are not considered dead. The following clip from the movie WALL-E is reminiscent of the line we walk when we perform ‘life saving’ organ transplants. At the end of the movie (go see it now if you don’t want it ruined!) WALL-E seems broken beyond repair and his friend attempts to fix him by replacing nearly all of his parts with new spare ones. When she is finished, we discover that WALL-E has lost his personality and the traits that made him seem human. At the end of the clip he is of course restored to his former self, because this is a children’s movie after all, but the adult audience should have been scared by the possibility that too much of WALL-E needed to be replaced. If we insist on defining death as a loss of our humanity through brain death, at what point do we draw the line? When can organ transplants which prolong biological life become the thing that takes away our humanity?

Works Cited

Lock, Margaret. 2002. Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sharp, Lesley A. 2008. Bodies Commodities and Biotechnologies: Death Mourning, and Scientific Desire in the Realm of Human Organ Transfer. New York: Columbia University Press. Pp. 47-105.

Images:

http://www.imageofsurgery.com/Surgery_Billroth.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HIwzZMqufg&feature=related
http://gandt.blogs.brynmawr.edu/files/2009/01/kate_moss_cyborg1.jpg
http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/brain-death-silence.gif
http://www.silhouettesclipart.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/halloween-grim-reaper-clipart.jpg

The Aging, Menopausal Woman

We understand when teens going through puberty run wild and crash cars, when pregnant women feel tired or unusually hungry, and even when grandparents have to take a little while longer getting up the stairs. No one expects these types of people to get on with their lives as usual. Juvenile delinquents receive more lenient treatment when convicted of a crime, pregnant women get time off work and their own parking spots close to the entrance at Target, and no one ever asks grandpa to carry heavy boxes up to the attic. To speak of these concessions does not seem shameful, as they are all natural signs of growing up and growing older. Why, then, are we afraid to make allowances and accommodations for women going through the natural aging process of menopause? Many women who reach the age of menopause are suddenly thrown into a world full of strange symptoms and changes in mood, which no one truly warned her about, and no one will discuss now! As though there is something shameful inherent in the process of aging for women. As though women are losing a part of what makes them female. Menopause has become a medicalized topic, which Americans understand as the symptoms of the cessation of menses, but the attempts to better understand menopause through science have not made us more comfortable with the topic.

American culture seems to have a fear of the aging process, which Margaret Lock believes has to do with what we characterize as normal. “In North America we worship at the alter of youth: normality means youth and vigor, regardless of gender…normal means to be of reproductive age” (Lock 1993: 376). We encounter issues with our conception of ourselves when we leave that reproductive age. “Middle-aged women…lose their reproductive potential; they go against the grain and in doing so are no longer truly female” (Ibid. 377). Even photographs of elderly women begin to look less female than the emphasized gender differences of youth.

The following video is an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, a medical drama on ABC that deals with many of the themes in modern western society that we have discussed this quarter. (I am surprised that references to this show have not been made before.) While the entire show is itself an interesting commentary on the American preoccupation with medicine (and sex), there are several segments of this particular episode, Let it Be, that speak directly to the concept of menopause. The doctors on the show are confronted with a woman who tested positively for the gene that indicates she may get ovarian cancer. Her dramatic response is to have her ovaries, uterus, and breasts removed, and replaced however successfully by prosthetics and hormone therapy in order to eliminate her chances of ever getting this type of cancer.

The first clip I will discuss is from times 23:13 to 24:28. The second clip is from 25:37 to 26:45. (I was unable to successfully divide up this video into clips, and was forced to post the whole episode).

In the first clip, the patient reveals that she is afraid that she will lose the power to turn heads, or even physically attract her husband, as she goes through premature menopause after surgery. She clearly understands the physical ramifications of removing her sex organs, and yet values her life over her gender, sexuality, and youth (and her normalcy, by Lock’s North American definition). While the patient does not take enough issue with this to consider fighting the cancer when and if it appears, her doctor does, and expresses herself in the second clip. The female doctor cannot imagine removing the pieces of her body that make up her identity as a woman. She compares it with male castration at the threat of testicular cancer, which it seems unlikely any man would carry out. While women going through menopause naturally are not literally removing pieces of their organs by choice, I believe American culture’s reaction to the process of menopause not very different than if she were. Our culture is unwilling to give the menopausal woman the time and understanding that she needs to reinvent herself without the part of her that once made her viable as a woman to society. Unlike male aging processes, female menopause is not a gradual process, but a defined event causing an upheaval in the lives of women as the consciously or subconsciously realize that they are no longer 'normal'.

The differences in the perception of ‘menopause’ between Japanese and American cultures is illustrated in great detail in Margaret Lock’s Encounters with Aging, and she discusses potential reasons for the disparity in her chapter on The Politics of Aging. She states that the Japanese idea of normal is more complex than North America’s definition, discussed above. “A Japanese usually specifies normal for whom, normal for what, relying less on a black-and-white dichotomy between pathology and normality and tending to place what is normal on a continuum re-created through time” (Ibid. 379). This malleable definition of what is normal is perhaps the reason why Japanese women experience their menopausal period in life differently than westerners. The procedures of aging are not abnormal for a woman of a certain age. There is no physical upheaval as her place in life and society is not called into question. Lock states that “it is not konenki that is abnormal; it is neither a disease nor an endocrine deficiency” (Ibid. 379).

With these thoughts in mind, the goals of American advertisements for anti-aging products become clear. Unlike the Japanese, who are expected to stay in control of konenki only so that they can support their family structure, Americans desire to remain youthful and normal for as long as possible. Effective marketing schemes idealize “the woman eternally young, forever feminine, and sexy, with reproductive capacity artificially prolonged so that she is no longer an anomaly but remains forever normal” (Ibid. 378). It is not all right to experience aging, despite the fact that everyone who does not die young will grow old. Why do Americans experience hot flashes more typically than Japanese women? Perhaps their bodies are expressing the unconscious embarrassment. Maybe we “blush” because we are ashamed when the cessation of menstruation confirms the idea that we are no longer feminine, no longer young, and no longer normal.



Works Cited

Grey's Anatomy. 13 November 2005. Season 2 Episode 8 "Let it Be".

Margaret Lock, The Making of Menopause AND Epilogue - The Politics of Aging - Flashes of Immortality. IN Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Pp. 303-329 AND Pp. 370-387.

Images:

http://pro.corbis.com/images/SW001076.jpg?size=67&uid=18E31C6A-EB8A-4D19-9D6F-12B968FECE23

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/79/232401868_11b958e9ab.jpg?v=0

http://www.comunidadebeatitudes.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/anti_aging.jpg

http://www.ri.cmu.edu/images/projects/hotflash.jpg

http://www.beautyfit-shop.com/images/jb_revitol-anti-aging-ad_386x207.jpg

Kids: say no to drugs! (Unless mommy says)

New scientific discoveries are made everyday in the fields of genetics and bioengineering. These are fields that greatly affect the biomedical community not only through the development of new procedures but also in the development of new, “smarter” drugs. In Rose’s article on Neruochemical Selves, he discusses new drugs which are based the intricate workings of the brain. Neurotransmitters and their receptors appear to run most of the mechanisms in the brain, from forming memories to calculating statistics. By affecting which neurotransmitters are degraded in the synaptic pathway, many scientists believe that they can control the multitude of disorders based in the brain, the seat of the mind. This applies most directly to the field of psychiatry where doctors search for the cure to mental disorders, or at least ways to maintain or control the symptoms. While there are obviously other areas of treatment for problems such as depression and bipolar disorder, I will reflect Rose’s paper in that I will focus on the drug induced side of medicine.

Why do we feel that we need drugs? When we are feeling sad or hyperactive, what makes us feel that we are sick and in need of chemical treatment in our brain? The advertisements that we see on television may hold an answer to this question. There are commercials for every type of conceivable problem; thoughts of suicide and massive depression are catered to just as frequently as products to grow thicker hair and eyelashes. But there are definite similarities between these commercials, in the way that they appeal to their audiences. The verbal side of the commercials is an important part, but first let’s consider the visual aspects that sell.

Commercials for drug products such as Pristiq, Abilify, and Zoloft* are designed to sell their product to people suffering from depression. The commercials begin with a black and white scene and a person wandering alone. As the advertisement progresses the loner discovers the miracle drug that changes their world from dark and dreary to full Technicolor! (There is also an appropriate progression from minor to major keys in the music in the background of the scene). As happiness and colors merge together, the person is joined by family or friends who are happy that the loner has returned from their dark days of depression. What this progression indicates to the audience is that the depressed person has discovered their old self, and regained control over their life and relationships, through the magic of a single pill. As Rose writes, these advertisements are “tied to an ethic of self-control, lifestyle promotion and self-realization” (Rose 2007: 212). The patient is given a chance to return to their former, happier days, which is a feeling that the commercial hopes to inspire in the audience. “These drugs too, participate in a political economy of hope” (Ibid. 211).

The verbal side of advertising is equally important. It is this side of the drug commercial that convinces the listener of the advertisement’s legitimacy (a concept discussed in detail with the articles by O’Dell and Langford). As the visual scene changes the patient’s life, there is a calm, comforting voice that quotes statistics of the number of people who use the prescription medication every day, and quotes doctors and reassuring success stories to put the audience further at ease. Often, the advertising campaign must sell “not so much the drug…as the disease itself” (Ibid. 213). It must first convince the audience that “they are suffering from a treatable condition” (Ibid. 213) in order to draw them into the doctor’s office for a prescription. If someone was unwilling to take drugs before, this message might help to convince them to talk to a doctor. As Zoloft advertises, “When you know more about what’s wrong you can help make it right.” This empowering statement, along with the often-quoted “Ask your doctor if ____ is right for you” encourages the notion of control over health and treatment.

Regardless of the ethics of pharmaceutical companies tricking us into taking medication for our every ache and pain, we live in America and are free to be duped into buying whatever product is sold to us on television. The drugs were certainly tested and shown to help some people, so there is a chance that pills can help a person’s chronic depression. Our trust in the medical profession may even create a placebo effect for the drug, causing improvement in daily life, if the side effects are not too severe. But ordering prescription drugs is no longer an exclusively adult activity. Children, who are too young to have developed their own opinions and control over their health, are now quickly diagnosed with the ever-popular ADHD, and given their own prescriptions to fill. Parents are generally known to be protective and caring, so what could bring them to the point of diagnosing their grade-schooler with a mental illness and pumping them up with drugs every day? Rose suggests that “parent activism in these areas is to dispute suggestions that the conditions of their children have anything to do with social conditions or parental management” (Ibid. 216). No one likes to be told that they are doing something bad to their children, and everyone would like to hear that their child is even smarter than the mediocre grades that they have been receiving from school. The marketing to the parents of young, hyperactive children reflects just that. Parents of difficult children find relief once the drugs start to kick in. A four-year-old suddenly has the attention span of a well-behaved six-year-old, and their grades in school reflect it. Ironically, just as the D.A.R.E. programs begin to tell children to “Say no to drugs”, the youngsters begin down a lifelong path of taking prescription medication. The imaginative and hyperactive nature of children seems to be taken into account only infrequently, and the children are soon convinced of the new truth that they need drugs, regardless of the facts. It is difficult to pinpoint the blame for this often needless lifelong dependency on drugs; the pharmaceutical companies that advertised to the parents, the doctors who wrote the prescriptions, and the parents who were scared of the behavior of their own children seem to be equally at fault.

Adults may seem to be entranced by their new, "neurochemical selves" (Ibid. 222) and their ability to put their life back in order with a prescription, but advertising campaigns are becoming too effective if children, who have not yet discovered who they are without drugs, are drawn into the pharmaceutical circle. At this point psychiatrists can hardly claim that they are 'doing no harm'.

*Note: these drug names are links to their respective commercials.

Works Cited

Nikolas Rose, 2007. Neurochemical Selves, IN The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pp. 187-223.

Images

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_VOtu9c_Pe70/Rt6-1Rv54NI/AAAAAAAAACQ/FawltTYc39g/s400/siamese_twins_600.jpg

http://www.cartoonstock.com/lowres/pbe0031l.jpg

http://chemicalimbalance.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/adderall-magazine-advertisement-fall-2005.jpg

http://www.pristiq.com/_assets/images/moa.jpg

http://photos.killervirgo.com/zoloft-things.jpg

http://adpharm.net/albums/Pharma_ads/060403/normal_Ablify.jpg

Medicalization of Homosexuality

Humans feel more comfortable when they can categorize their world. When things are not simply black or white, male or female, true or false, we become less able to make quick judgments and decisions. And when we watch truths that we used to hold dear come crashing down around us, we naturally feel afraid. This is the case with the medicalization of gender roles and homosexuality in American society. One of the fundamental assumptions that we make in order to competently conduct social interactions is the assumption of gender. If we can place a person in even that general category of male or female, it is infinitely easier to find the rules appropriate for a conversation with a stranger. Even details such as which person should hold the door for another depends greatly on the gender of those two people. While rules like holding the door open are relatively lax in American society, other cultures hold them in much higher esteem, even incorporating them into language. It is therefore understandable that the idea of homosexual men and women, who straddle the gender boxes rather than remaining neatly packaged, set the nation into a panic. This panic inspired Americans to turn to the general authority figures on everything biological. “Medicine was seen as both humane and rational, its practitioners offered an enlightened way to understand and manage the problem” (Terry 1999:41). Americans looked to science to reinforce the gender boxes.

Those early answers that the American public was given appear to most of today’s society to be very rough around the edges. As Terry wrote in Medicalizing Homosexuality, “we could say that, for the most part, medical authorities neglected to devise sound hypotheses or to conduct empirically sound studies measuring a properly constituted research population against a control populations.” (Ibid. 71) It has been said that hindsight is 20/20, and in this case we should be careful to judge what happened in the past Terry also writes, “to declare them as pseudo-scientific would be expedient and even accurate…but these ideas were not only accepted for their time” (Ibid. 72). The concept that some of the “old fashioned” ideas about gender are still around today makes them worthy of a closer look.

Beginning in the 1860s, western physicians began making discoveries on the subject of homosexuality. The discoveries in this age fell into three categories of naturalist, degenerationist, and psychogenist; the ideas about homosexuality ranged from a natural and benign anomaly to socially caused behavior (Ibid. 43), and often viewed homosexual tendencies as deviant and dangerous. It was not until the late 1800s that some of the views that are more mainstream today appeared in the writings on homosexuality. A man by the name of Hirschfeld (a homosexual himself) wrote that “homosexuality is neither a disease nor degeneracy…but rather represents a piece of the natural order, a sexual variation like numerous, analogous sexual modifications in the animal and plant kingdoms” (Ibid. 54). Typical Freudian claims about homosexuality were also prevalent during this time, regarding childhood stages of homosexuality and the arrested development of adult homosexuals (Ibid. 56). As science progressed to the study of endocrinology at the turn of the 20th century, so did the research on homosexuality. Hormones like testosterone and estrogen were used in attempts to ‘cure’ homosexual tendencies. However these studies soon reported that “no influence upon the behavior or the personality of the patient could be detected” (Ibid. 163). The very idea that this type of hormone therapy was even attempted shows us the continued prevalence of the idea of homosexuality being a disease in need of a cure.

The views and claims about homosexuality that we see today are in some aspects very different than those discussed above. The modern method of research involves molecular biological research on genes. This research is done less by researchers looking for a cure than scientists still attempting to put a solid box around what it means to be gay. But we cannot be fooled by the apparent acceptance of homosexuality in today’s world. Prejudice and bigotry are as present as ever, and because homophobic groups are no longer in the world’s majority, they have become even more outspoken about their opinions. Gay marriage is still a hot debate around the world, and while some countries seem to have had very little resistance to the idea of gay couples being just another type of union, America has had no such luck. Fortunately for humanity’s sake, this view is not international. While Americans cannot seem to even allow equal rights to all sexes and genders, Iceland has recently elected the world’s first gay (and, incidentally, female) prime minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir. The difference between Icelandic culture and American culture is so great that most Icelandic people are no more interested in their prime minister’s personal life than if she were a happily married heterosexual. It is therefore not surprising that Icelandic scientists are less preoccupied with finding a ‘gay gene’, or even hoping that such a thing exists. Our fear still makes us turn to science to find answers.

Unfortunately science has not seemed to be able to fix the problem, despite all of its findings in the psychiatric and genetic realms. American culture has indeed changed since the 1800s, but our intent to package sex neatly has not wavered, indicating our residual fear of the unknown. Until the 1950s, researchers used a test that categorized people on a masculinity to femininity spectrum, which was created in the 1930s, based on the sex continuum hypothesis. The questions on this test “continued to conflate one’s preferred role in sexual encounters (i.e., passive or active) with ones overall gender identification" (Ibid. 171), indicating the continued cultural bias of research conducted as recently as 60 years ago. What makes us think that our research today is any less biased? The hunt for a way to categorize homosexuality in a scientific manner will continue for centuries, as we come to realize and then sort through all of our biases. I believe that our only real hope of recovery from this downward scientific spiral lies in American history. Not too long ago a frightened craze swept the nation regarding race, and biracial marriages. As we no longer conduct intense research on African Americans, indeed to do so would be highly frowned upon, one can only hope that the medicalization of homosexuality will eventually cease as well.



Works Cited

Jennifer Terry, 1999. Medicalizing Homosexuality and Fluid Sexes, IN An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pp. 40-73, 159-177.

Images:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3hanna_Sigur%C3%B0ard%C3%B3ttir

http://th02.deviantart.net/fs20/300W/f/2007/243/a/2/Hindsight_is_20_20_by_xsaraphanelia.jpg

http://www.slapupsidethehead.com/wp-content/media/2008/06/new-dress-code.jpg

http://toppun.com/Rainbow-Store/Gay-Pride-Pictures/I%27m-Gay-Don%27t-Worry-It%27s-Not-Contagious-Gay-Pride-Flag-Colors.gif

http://www.homophobiaday.org/utilisateur/images/homophobie/images2008/camp_homophobia2008.jpg

http://cedarlounge.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/gay_000306marriage.gif

http://www.rationalunderstanding.co.uk/Images/gg.jpg

Medicinal Meals: You are what you eat.

Most people put thought into the things that they eat. If they had a choice they would consume a meal that they find especially tasty over one that is merely nutritious; they would take fruit directly from a tree over the under-ripe Safeway brands; and they would choose the things that are said to make them live longer, healthier lives over the foods that they believe are‘ bad’ for the body. All of this thought goes into what we eat, and yet I have never considered food to be a type of medicine until I began reading Farquhar’s article on “Medicinal Meals”.

On first examination of the title “Medicinal Meals” I immediately pictured a meal substitute in the form of a pill (as seen above), because the words medicine, pills, and drugs are nearly synonymous in my vocabulary. I assumed that the article would describe the biomedically induced tendency to pop pills at the slightest discomfort, as well as the American fad of replacing sit-down meals with on-the-go, condensed snack bars and energy drinks. While Farquhar’s article does address these ideas, it does so in an indirect fashion by examining the contrasting holistic view of Chinese medicine. Many cultures have long believed that a balanced diet is the first and most important step to a healthy body and preventative treatment of illness. Our culture’s restrictive idea of medicine in pill form is unusual in this respect. But even by western standards of medicine it is actually quite easy to compare food to the pills that we consume. Both enact a change in our bodies to fight illness; indeed the change that food enacts on our bodies is more immediate and noticeable than that of drugs. Even televised ads for eating certain foods in order to effect change in our lives could be seen as self-prescriptions, but these links between drugs and food are not solidified in western culture.

While the west draws a fine line between the things that we eat for their energetic value (to stave of starvation) and the things that we eat to cure pain (drugs), Chinese culture embraces the similarities. To find a cookbook in a Chinese bookstore one can look either in the cookbook section or in the health care section (Farguhar 2002:51). What has western medicine done so differently to make us give very little credit to the curative properties of our food? To put it simply, western medicine is anatomically based in muscles and microorganisms, while Chinese medicine “cares little about anatomy…as a functional medicine that reads the manifestations of physiological and pathological changes without resorting to models of fixed structural relations” (Ibid. 64). The Chinese holistic view looks to the balances of the body’s elements rather than its physiological malfunctions. And it is for this reason that the west gives the idea of the taste of our medicines much less thought than in Chinese herbal treatment.

Of course I am not referring to the literal taste of medicine, (bad tasting things are known worldwide to be given as medicine) but rather the five flavors of pungent, sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. These flavors are not simply syrups that we can pour on our food, and do not merely correspond to the reactions of our taste buds. They have fundamental characteristics which make up the basis of a Chinese pharmacy. The story goes that “Shen Nong, the sage king and mythical founder of herbal medicine ‘tasted one hundred herbs’ and on the basis of this experience produced the first material medica text.” (Ibid. 63). The flavors that Shen Nong categorized for future treatment were not just for the asthetics of food but could induce lasting changes and responses in the body.

This method of invoking change in the body explains why Chinese medicine did not first turn to the anatomy of the body for answers. Without dissection or diagrams, the symptoms described by the patient could be treated by balances of flavors in a medicinal brew. In turn, preventative care was not as complicated as a nutritional food pyramid, but rather a day to day process of balancing the flavors of food in daily life. In China the concept of ‘you are what you eat’ is more than just a slogan to scare obese people away from fatty cheeseburgers. It is a process ingrained so deeply that even when something goes wrong in the body, a strong brew built off of individual diet and symptoms restores balance to bodily systems.

The idea of individualized medicine is not foreign to western culture. Indeed everyone would love to be given a miracle pill, or ‘silver bullet’ to put their ailing bodies back on the right track. This is not to say that the practice of biomedicine is changing to lean in a more holistic direction. Rather, researchers in the field of genetics are beginning to think that they could tailor drugs to match our DNA, our individual genetic makeup. Is this a modern version of Shen Nong’s ancient traditions? Not in the slightest. But the idea of new individualized medicine combined with the fears that the non-scientists of the west still hold against genetic modification (as illustrated in Chapter 5 of Chen’s Food, Medicine, and the Quest for Good Health) may be enough to create a niche for Chinese medicine. The west has recently seen fads in yoga and acupuncture, as well as the development of a naturopathic clinic. Especially in light of the recent obesity scare, it is possible that the next stage in our acceptance of other forms of healing may be to embrace the saying ‘you are what you eat’. We may consider the effects of our food beyond an image of physical fitness and perfection, leading to a change in what we require from the medical profession.

Works Cited

Chen, Nancy, 2009. Food, Medicine, and the Quest for Good Health. New York: Columbia University Press. Pp. 12-52, 79-107.

Farquhar, Judith, 2002. Medicinal Meals. IN Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China. Durham: Duke University Press. Pp. 47-77.

Images:
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http://www.blisstree.com/geneticsandhealth/files/2006/05/personalized%20medicine.jpg

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"From both a will to believe and an actual belief"

Image from http://www.smart-kit.com/s1763/the-spinning-girl/

When one first views the above ‘spinning’ dancer she is moving in either a clockwise or counterclockwise direction. The trick is that you can make her turn the other way. The first time you do this it will probably be by accident, by looking slightly away or by watching her feet. But with practice you can do it on purpose, with the only power of your mind. Is it magic? No. It is simply a trick of the brain. The above image is an optical illusion. It is a mostly two-dimensional image of a dancer’s silhouette and the moving appearance of the pixels encourages our brains to form a rotating three-dimensional model. There is not enough information given in the pixels for a fully rotating dancer, so our brain can choose which way to fill in the missing details. Some sites claim that this rotating dancer is to be used as a method of deciding if a person has a dominant right or left-brain. Regardless of the truth in that statement, the dancer silhouette lets us see how easy it is to trick the organs that we rely on the most. Traditionally, we feel that we must see something to believe it, but it is obviously quite simple to trick the eyes, and thus the body that believes in them.

Obscure though it may seem, this image was the first thing that came to mind after reading the discussions on magic, spas, and “quacks” in the June 30th readings by Tom O’Dell and Jean M. Langford. The combination of the dancer’s physically fit form with the illusion of motion and three dimensions connected the two papers nicely. In short, both authors (and O’Dell in the most literal sense) are asking, “But is it really Magic?”(O’Dell 2005:31) The layout of these papers is a step-by-step process of determining if a pulse reader has mystical powers or if spas are actually places that ‘recharge’ our batteries. Are these places of healing and wellness mostly based on illusion?

Before we judge too quickly there are important references in Langford’s piece that allude to the practice of illusion our own western methods of healing. Medical anthropologists agree that “it might be said that science’s most dazzling show is its illusion of objectivity” (Langford 1999: 31) While we attach meaning and necessity to stethoscopes and hanging sterile drapes around the operating tables, these practices just as easily serve to objectify the surgical area for the doctors. While we do not see practicing physicians avidly advertising their services (in general), it is this very practice that helps us determine that their skills are legitimate. We are given the illusion of scientific objectivity to increase our faith in the practice of healing, and ultimately the success of the medical practice.

That being said, O’Dell’s comments about the marketing world of spas prove that not all healing practices are above such advertisement. His section on magical representations details the amazing similarities between two very differently themed spas. Regardless of their origins in Swedish and Japanese arts, both spas sport brochures on calming massages that restrain you from joining the bustling world, and pictures of serene people taking time out to rejuvenate themselves, largely alone (O’Dell 2005:25-6). People come to take time out of their busy, stressful lives and be welcomed into the calming arms of a soothing massage and spiritual cleansing. “Spas draw heavily upon the imagery of the well of eternal youth arguably one of humanity’s oldest fantasies” (Ibid. 32) especially in their use of baths and special oils and scrubs, used to cleanse and invigorate the body and soul. But are these treatments magical? It depends on your definition. If magic is a result of an action that you believed would inexplicably yet inevitably bring about that result, then yes, the spas could be defined as magic. “In the cases where patrons do leave the spa feeling better, magic has been worked. It is a magic that stems from both a will to believe and an actual belief.” (Ibid. 32) For magic to be worked, the patrons must participate in a societal belief that the magic can be worked.

Langford’s critique of Dr. Mistry eventually comes to this same conclusion, though by a very different path. He researches the claims of Dr. Mistry’s false healing practices, and indeed encounters multiple discrepancies. He discovers that the chemical makeup of shilajit is not consistent between healing practices; in fact, the kind that Langford tests is made of sugar (Langford 1999:29). The images that I personally found online featuring this material were equally varied, depicting dark gritty material resembling anything from obsidian to volcanic rock. In addition, Langford discovered that Dr. Mistry mimics an image not only of the certification practices of Ayruveda, much to the dismay of the of said healing practice, but also of the ‘folk’ method of divining illness from pulse. These claims support the idea that what he does is “quackery”, as his many colleagues predicted. Langford, however, remained unconvinced long enough to find out some of the reasons behind Dr. Mistry’s questionable practices. The doctor uses his patient’s testimonials, his framed certifications, and his pulse readings to inspire in his patients a sense of faith. Dr. Mistry himself admitted, “80 percent of illness is psychological…pulse reading sparks the faith that fires the healing process” (Ibid. 40). He claims not to be magical, but to inspire faith in the healing that he provides. Dr. Mistry’s practice itself shows that a strong belief in a method can be at least half of the battle towards wellness.

The senses can be fooled just as the silhouetted dancer can be made to spin both ways. These papers have come to show me that everyone has, and needs, a little ‘magic’ in their lives, whether they call it by that name or not. The objective illusion of science has recently helped reassure me in my own trip to an institution of healing. Panicked thoughts of death and disaster were soothed by calming brochures and forms that listed my common symptoms, reassuring me that everything would soon be taken care of by capable, educated people. Applying this idea to the marketing of spas and Ayruveda practices for purely monetary gain may be unethical, but the mimicry of inspiring faith in a possible cure for pain seems to be necessary for a wide range of effective healing methods. This is something that may be easily open to criticism by the ‘well’, but for a frightened patient or an overstressed businessperson, a trick of the mind can inspire irreplaceable reassurance, and ultimate recovery.

Works Cited

Jean M. Langford, 1999. "Medical Mimesis: Healing Signs of a Cosmopolitan 'Quack'." American Ethnologist 26(1):24-46.

Tom O'Dell, 2005. "Meditation, Magic and Spiritual Regeneration: Spas and the Mass Production of Serenity." IN Orvar Lofgren and Robert Willim, eds. Magic, Culture and the New Economy. Oxford, UK: Berg Publishers. Pp. 19-36.

Images from:
http://www.threepharm.ro/medical/images/products/151_497.JPG
http://www.vegasconcierge.com/images/Spa1LG.jpg
http://www.iamshaman.com/eshop/products/medium/asphaltum.jpg