medicine

Are You My Guru? How Medicine, Meditation, and Madonna Saved my Life

barbara — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Are You My Guru: How Medicine, Meditation, and Madonna Saved My Life is Wendy Shanker’s follow-up to The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life. It is a hilarious and inspiring account of Shanker’s battle with Wegener’s disease, a rare autoimmune disease that results in inflammation of blood vessels in various organs. Using her love of Madonna as well as her journey in trying to find treatment in traditional and alternative forms of medicine, Shanker dangerously treads Eat Pray Love territory but ultimately gives an honest account of her journey.

The book reads like an open conversation, and I could hear Shanker telling me about her struggles to juggle a fatal disease, her weight, and her stressful work life. Rather than writing as a distant and wise survivor, Shanker writes as a relatable source, another person struggling with her own conflict. Her strength is in writing about the struggles to maintain both physical and spiritual health, and how the two correlate. Rather than reading as a self-help novel, Shanker’s work serves as a self-reflection piece, serving as a conversation piece in understanding how we define health today, particularly as it pertains to women.

While Shanker clearly states that her book is her own journey with finding peace with her condition, Are You My Guru began to resemble Eat Pray Love in some of its more contrived moments of enlightenment. While Shanker used these moments sparingly, I was still hesitant about some of the conveniently “miraculous” moments of the book. Both Gilbert and Shanker speak of random moments of clarity, or messages from God in the most tight of situations. While some of Shanker’s more convenient moments (i.e something she prays for coming true at that moment), may be true, maybe the skeptic in me believes that those moments are there more for substance. Some may read her book and try to use it as the foundation of their own treatment of their own difficulties. However, Shanker is far clearer than Gilbert in cautioning readers that this was her own journey. Her book serves as an encouragement to find a regiment that suits the reader personally. Unlike Gilbert, Shanker maintains her ability to maintain intimacy with the reader.

Though I was more skeptical of some of the more “lucky” moments, where passages were stylized for the sake of substance, these moments did appear sparingly. I think the strongest aspect of Are You My Guru is Shanker’s relentless and honest optimism. Despite the hardships that are constantly thrown at her, she never asks the reader for pity, and that strength is inspiring. Shanker also changed my view of Madonna, someone that I did not really give much thought to as a feminist icon. However, her relationship with her idol is very poignant and entertaining.

Overall, I recommend Are You My Guru. Shanker is honest, vibrant, and hilarious, and I found her story to be thought provoking and well written.

Written by: Sara Yasin, November 13th 2010

Black Dogs and Blue Words: Depression and Gender in the Age of Self-Care

admin — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Kimberly Emmons

Rutgers University Press

Jerry Seinfeld jokes that pharmaceutical companies could save time by naming all of their antidepressants “Cramitol” (“Cram it all”). Kimberly Emmons would likely agree. Her eye-opening Black Dogs and Blue Words opens up an original, potentially life-changing perspective on antidepressants and the companies who market them. Emmons, an English professor at Case Western Reserve University and an expert in medical rhetoric, offers shocking and persuasive evidence that women are not only the targets of these ads, but have become complicit in the targeting.

Emmons builds her case brick by brick. Although her prose is academic and dense in places, the slowly building logic and the reader’s ensuing sense of outrage make the book as hard to put down as any who-dun-it. In fact, the book is its own brand of who-dun-it. How did women become Big Pharma bullseyes? Solving the mystery requires understanding how the language of antidepressant advertising both reflects and shapes gender stereotypes. To illustrate, Emmons dissects print and broadcast ads word by word and frame by frame. She points out how words such as “excessive crying," “fatigue," “loss of zest,” and “tearfulness” have long been used in our culture to describe women’s emotions and alleged deficits, and how drug manufacturers have co-opted the phrasing to describe depression.

It gets worse. Analyzing the photographs that accompany the ads, Emmons demonstrates how they reflect our societal norms of acceptable female behavior. The ads feature sad women standing apart from their family, women whose disappointed children accuse them of being “no fun anymore,” and protective fathers with their arms around children, standing apart from mom, fixing her with baleful stares. Next frame, the woman diagnoses herself with depression. Next, she is shown at her doctor’s office requesting antidepressants, and, presto, next frame, the woman has been restored to her acceptable “gendered self.” How do we know? She reports her progress as she shops for the family groceries, or while playing with her children, or while involved in some other womanly scenario. Emmons also surveys children’s literature and that women’s magazine staple, the self-diagnostic quiz, with equally interesting and well-considered conclusions.

One of the book’s most fascinating chapters traces the history of the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which, as the title implies, spells out the criteria for diagnosing psychiatric illnesses. In one of her biggest bombshells, Emmons reveals that much of the language employed by Big Pharma to describe depression is not found in the DSM. Rather, drug manufacturers have cherry-picked synonyms primarily associated with women. Women absorb the ads, diagnose themselves with depression and make a beeline for the doctor’s office. The doctor, bombarded by the same marketing and lacking the time for a more in-depth probing, agrees. Prescription signed. Pills sold. And so we circle.

But don’t think that Emmons is anti-antidepressant, because she isn’t. Her view is much more reasoned. She acknowledges the good that medication can do under the right circumstances. But she also urges women to go from a regime of self-doctoring to a regime of self-care. Emmons uses “self-doctoring” to refer to women’s willingness to buy into the pharma-philosophy that emotional and social malaise stem from chemical problems which only can have chemical solutions. By accepting this rhetoric, says Emmons, women deprive themselves of their own personal narrative, one which may have little or nothing to do with clinical depression.

In contrast, self-care involves reacting to signals that something is not right with a conscious surveying of one’s life and all its circumstances. Perhaps medication will help. Or perhaps a much more profound change is in order. Learning how we have been manipulated, our lives altered by corporate profiteering, is depressing. Pass me the Cramitol. On second thought, don’t. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Written by: T. Tamara Weinstein, July 12th 2010

Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill

admin — Sat, 01 May 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Gabriela Soto Laveaga

Duke University Press

Professor Gabriela Soto Laveaga’s newest monograph, Jungle Laboratories, is a telling history that unravels the transnational political economy of barbasco yam production in Mexico from its discovery to its use in the early medicalization of synthetic hormonal steroids that created the birth control pill. According to Laveaga, the developing country context of the Pill’s history was so successfully erased from history that even the “peasant” culture in Oaxaca has allegedly forgotten its own crucial role in one of the past century’s most important scientific breakthroughs. Part of what Marxist theorists would call the “false consciousness” of history is revealed in this book.

Although production of synthetic hormones in Mexico predated World War I, controlling the barbasco trade in the the early to mid-1970s became a national project for the Mexican government. After reading Jungle Laboratories, I got the sense that “making the pill” was part of a larger initiative of “making a nation” consisting of “biocitizens” who were not just part of elite scientific knowledge production but were also expected to self-regulate their own population growth as part of President Luis Echeverría’s vision of a new Mexico.

While women were targeted for birth control campaigns, “male campesinos were encouraged to read agrarian law and technical manuals to become better and more productive citizens.” It is clear from these examples that women were positioned as part of the "population problem" to be acted upon by policies, whereas men were seen as the future policymakers and the population empowered by educational campaigns. Although the author could have written a feminist analysis of the nationalist projects, she did not; this is my own feminist reading taken from separate examples in the text that were separated by almost a hundred pages in Laveaga's book.

In general, Laveaga could have drawn out more of a critical analysis. The introduction gave an anthropologist like me high hopes for the inclusion of social theories ranging from Nikolas Rose’s biocitizenship to Michael Taussig’s theories on the layering of history and the magic of the state. However, with the exception of a couple of mentions, the theoretical underpinnings to this story were almost invisible. Given its gripping narrative, and implications for social theories pulled from elsewhere, Laveaga’s book is a good buy for an undergraduate curriculum such as reproductive health and medical anthropology. It is also an engaging read for women who are curious about the political economy of the pills they are popping on a daily basis.

Written by: Maya N. Vaughan-Smith, May 1st 2010

Dr. Mary Walker: An American Radical, 1832-1919

admin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Sharon M. Harris

Rutgers University Press

Dr. Mary Walker: An American Radical, 1832-1919 is a plethora of facts, evidence, and tightly woven themes that are well-researched by Harris, yet the book isn’t boring or dry. I found it inspirational and enraging at the same time. Women of the past made it easier for women today by tirelessly battling for women’s rights (and for men who were not white property owners). Walker was a dutiful and energetic soldier. She served in the Union army during the civil war as a commissioned medical officer although she had to fight to get that official position.

Harris’ work reveals that Walker spent every waking moment living the fight for equality and justice for all. When other physicians slammed her for treating the working class (that were considered beneath male doctors), she kept on. Men and women alike ridiculed her for even believing she had the brains to be a registered physician, but she persevered.

Being a female activist back then was quite difficult. The suffragists, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were adept at bickering and jockeying for centre stage, and Walker was no exception. Gaining the right to vote in the U.S. (eighteen months after Walker’s death) has not erased these divisions among activists today. From personal experience, I can attest to being treated as invisible by many middle class activists because I’m a sole-supporting parent and working class.

As a radical, Walker could not walk down the street without being physically assaulted for not wearing feminine clothes. Bricks, food, and yells often greeted her as she carried on her way. Today, nobody throws bricks at me while walking out in public, but men still stop their cars to yell at me if they don’t like what I wear. After reading about Walker’s experiences, I took some comfort in knowing that while we have made progress since Walker’s time, we still have a long way to go before all men, women, and children are treated with the respect they are due.

Walker is an example of how we need to continue to fight to be given the same rights as the more privileged members of society. Harris presents Walker in a balanced light that made me want to keep reading until the final page. Maybe in a hundred years, women will not only be able to vote, but also get paid on par with men and walk down the street knowing they are safe.

Written by: Nicolette Westfall, March 1st 2010

Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950 – 1980

admin — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:09:00 +0000

By Rebecca Kluchin

Rutgers University Press

In 2004, at the age of twenty-three, I entered my gynecologist's office to request permanent sterilization. My doctor repeatedly refused my request, and would not honor my alternate request for an IUD. I tried changing doctors, but still encountered severe resistance to my wish to be permanently sterilized. Now that the IUD I did eventually obtain will be ready to come out at age thirty, my doctor has still indicated that she will not perform the procedure.

After reading Rebecca Kluchin's Fit to Be Tied, I am left wondering if my doctors' refusals to honor my wishes are, consciously or not, vestigial traces of America's bleak history involving positive and negative eugenics—separate categories for "fit" and "unfit" women. From the turn of the twentieth century to the late 1970s, social, legal, and medical authoritarianism and paternalism combined with white anxiety over losing social dominance in America to result in extraordinarily skewed, disparate policies of reproductive "rights" for white middle class women and poor women of color.

In the post-WWII era, concerns were raised about the population "explosion" and the resulting fear that poor, uneducated immigrants and people of color were "outbreeding" the white middle and upper classes. Griswold v. Connecticut, the landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing contraception for married couples, would not be decided until 1965, and few if any women had access to contraception at all. The solution put into effect by medical and legal authorities was to adopt a policy of eugenics: the undesirable minorities, often unwed, sunken into poverty, and with little to no recourse, were aggressively encouraged and often forced into unwanted sterilizations. Women were deceived, lied to, and even legally sentenced to sterilization under the white- and male-dominated cultural paradigm. The worst of these forced sterilization cases were known colloquially in the South as "Mississippi appendectomies," in which women deemed "unfit" to reproduce by physicians entered hospitals for routine surgeries (such as appendix removal) only to later find that their ovaries and uterus had been taken out as well.

Meanwhile, advances in sterilization procedures made the operation quite attractive to middle class white women who wanted to take control of their reproductive destiny. These women appealed to physicians and hospitals in order to obtain tubal ligations, only to find themselves rebuffed. Educated white women of privilege were denied sterilization because it was believed that they should give birth to as many children as possible, despite their own feelings on the matter. Many hospitals developed what was known as the "120 rule" of age/parity: if a reproductively "fit" woman's age multiplied by the number of children she had added up to 120, a sterilization was provided.

Sterilization for men is also touched upon in Fit to Be Tied. Infuriatingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, vasectomies have historically been provided on demand for men with little to no trepidation on the part of medical professionals.

On another personal note, I discussed this book with a friend of mine, who said it sounded interesting but "suspect." He did not know that eugenics was practiced openly in America for many decades, and believed that Kluchin's book was essentially feminist conspiracy theory. This sort of troubling ignorance of history only deepens the importance and necessitates the knowledge of medico-legal authoritarianism over women in America's past. Kluchin's work is straightforward, factual, academic, and exhaustively researched, but not intimidatingly so. It is a highly absorbing read and an incisive, grim but eminently necessary look into pre-Roe v. Wade America.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, October 11th 2009

Doctor Olaf Van Schuler’s Brain

admin — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 23:33:00 +0000

By Kristen Menger-Anderson

Algonquin Books

A thriller that spans five centuries, Doctor Olaf Van Schuler’s Brain is entertaining and thought provoking. Thirteen generations of eccentric New York City doctors navigate genius, madness and morality. This book is eerie, smart, unique, and very delicately crafted, telling many stories in every layer of time.

The Van Schulers and Steenwycks are a family of eccentric, genius, medical people, mostly doctors, some more on the fringe than others, some mad. Each has his unique specialty. Their fallibilities play out over obsessions with the brain and the mind. Each generation is engaged in inventing a medical fad of the era. For some, the result is tragic. For most it is less clear whether the result has been heroic or tragic. Always, someone has been fooled.

One physician hides both his mother’s extreme madness and his study of the brain from the Catholic Church. He is convinced he will cure her. He also suffers from lunacy. His obsession with collecting the brains of deceased animals escalates into a gruesome, out of control spiral that condemns them both. Others are almost as odd, though less secretive and polarized. One testifies in favor of a philandering widow, that his deceased wife died of spontaneous combustion by alcoholism. Another performs an experimental surgery, one of the first lobotomies, on his younger sister, hiding this from his older sisters. One Steenwyck is a medicine showman. Wives swallow gulps of radium to promote fertility and feed it to their husbands, revealing secret wishes.

The Steenwycks continue the tradition of cutting edge medicine into the modern era. The protagonists in the last two or three chapters happen to be women. Neither the oddness nor the deceit seem quite as striking or overt in the last era. But maybe that is because we are living in the same time. This novel is quite a reflection on changes in beliefs and the application of science. The only time the change seemed abrupt was the later shift to the 1980s, though maybe that is because it is closer to now. This is what makes it so thought provoking: the gradual transition from backward ways that were once new, all the way to the controversial new.

The novel was truly a pleasure to read and thoroughly researched. The odd medical techniques are real, and nested in the beliefs and social climate of each era. It would be especially fun for anyone interested in the history of medicine. It would be interesting to use to generate discussion in a seminar related to ethics, the history of medicine, or the history of New York City.

Written by: Heather Irvine, April 17th 2009

Patient Listening: A Doctor’s Guide

admin — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:44:00 +0000

By Loreen Herwaldt

University of Iowa Press

We talked for 45 minutes. It didn’t take much. You’re not asking them to be a guru, a Tibetan monk, a psychologist, or practice in a different field. Just ask one more question, two more questions. Somehow everything comes into place much quicker.

This patient’s story captures the meaning of this collection of prose by twenty-four writers who have extensive experiences as patients. Loreen Herwaldt is a physician and educator in Internal Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of Iowa who selected close to one hundred pieces in Patient Listening in order to help students and medical practitioners appreciate the importance of communication and listening in their service.

An introduction and additional section, along with responses from other professionals, orient educators and practitioners on how to use this book. Here, a section of prose by a patient summarizes the purpose of what follow, “Medical training is fantastically narrow and intensive. It has to be…I’m not saying doctors need to go to liberal arts college…but I think it would be important to get the patient’s point of view.”

The patients' experiences are negative and positive, sometimes both are heard from the same author. Some experience alienation, for example, while overhearing a teaching physician excitedly pegging her as “a great case” and telling students “[t]hey were going to have an opportunity to do things they didn’t normally do.” Another appreciates a statement made by a surgeon who suddenly gets that the two don't have a good rapport: “No, you’ve had enough trouble with your eyes, you’re not having trouble with your doctors as well.”

Patients also take responsibility for their own experiences: “I thought if I got really sick, people would pay attention.” Another woman, who had a bone marrow replacement, describes taking the advice of hospital staff: to put up a picture of herself when she was healthy, so friends would remember and other staff members would be more likely to treat her like a “normal” person. Another appreciative piece relates, “I could not imagine getting 87,000 phone calls the way my hematologist does and not being half crazy. But he’s not… When I see him he is incredibly focused… and he’s very compassionate."

On average, the prose in Patient Listening has a tone that is critical of patient-doctor relationships, but there are many positive examples interwoven. In short, this book would be helpful read for anyone in either of the “two classes” described by one author: the “healthy in white coats, calling the shots” and “the great cases.”

Written by: Heather Irvine, July 23rd 2008