In The Postmortal Condition: From the Biomedical Deconstruction of Death to the Extension of Longevity, Celine Lafontaine discusses how the pursuit of clinical and scientific medicine has driven individual health to become a main concern in our culture. With boundaries and parameters around death itself being altered and complex, new frameworks concerning aging and the value of the body begin to shift. There are “social and ethical consequences for this marked desire to conquer death scientifically,” and to try and live without an aging body (Lafontaine 297). While the focus of health and the older population run sided by side with advancements in modern medicine, the deconstruction, or destruction of death continues to gain speed and power. By having a compulsive population determined to live forever, mixed with this unlimited power and control of medical knowledge at the very core of social regulation, the health care system, and policy makers begin spiraling into an uneven growing network. While modern medical treatments are working to extend a patient’s life, and health insurance companies are funding treatments to significantly lengthen survival rates for failing bodies, public policy and laws to support these new changes are not moving fast enough to keep up.
In Aged bodies and kinship matters: The ethical field of kidney transplant, the authors discuss how “contemporary medicine” places “death within a framework of ethical decision making that emphasizes the fight against specific moral diseases and conditions” (Kaufman & Russ 81). The treatments set up within the health system, such as programs that fund renal dialysis for kidney failure, in turn, keep patients alive much longer, thereby contributing to the increase of demand for kidney transplants. Because of the technological advances in medicine and increased funding for life sustaining treatment, the demand has grown for transplants. Without finding a balanced system that sets forth policy and strategy, aligned with an industry that is working hard to extend life at all cost, we will continue to see a decline in “humanistic social values and social relations” (Sheper-Hughes 9). This warped relationship is fueling many of the inequalities and health problems that continue to exist, if not creating more. It seems are current organ donation system is set up to pay the recipients with a kidney and pay the doctors, while leaving the donor with absolutely nothing. How are donors compensated for their body, time, life and services? However, this thought brings up serious ethical and legal concern. Is it possible to have a program set up that supports the changing technological environments of biomedicine, the growing number of elderly, and the increasing populations that are misrepresented with limited resources? Has our current system influenced and set up black market activities around the selling of organs?
In Aged bodies and kinship matters: The ethical field of kidney transplant, the authors discuss how “contemporary medicine” places “death within a framework of ethical decision making that emphasizes the fight against specific moral diseases and conditions” (Kaufman & Russ 81). The treatments set up within the health system, such as programs that fund renal dialysis for kidney failure, in turn, keep patients alive much longer, thereby contributing to the increase of demand for kidney transplants. Because of the technological advances in medicine and increased funding for life sustaining treatment, the demand has grown for transplants. Without finding a balanced system that sets forth policy and strategy, aligned with an industry that is working hard to extend life at all cost, we will continue to see a decline in “humanistic social values and social relations” (Sheper-Hughes 9). This warped relationship is fueling many of the inequalities and health problems that continue to exist, if not creating more. It seems are current organ donation system is set up to pay the recipients with a kidney and pay the doctors, while leaving the donor with absolutely nothing. How are donors compensated for their body, time, life and services? However, this thought brings up serious ethical and legal concern. Is it possible to have a program set up that supports the changing technological environments of biomedicine, the growing number of elderly, and the increasing populations that are misrepresented with limited resources? Has our current system influenced and set up black market activities around the selling of organs?
Nancy Scheper-Hughes says, “new relations between capital and labor, bodies and the state, inclusion and exclusion have taken shape,” and some have created inequalities (9). She questions the ways in which this market functions, and breaks apart the organized relations within it. The flow of kidneys move from the poor to the rich, coming from poorer countries and traveling to the richer ones, such as the United States. These transplants transactions are circulating from South to North, “from black and brown bodies to white ones, and from females to males” (Scheper-Hughes 150). The exchange and sacrifice of the body pulls in many questions concerning beliefs in the holiness and value of the body. By participating in free market medicine a person must divide and detach from their body. Those that are “lured into selling their organs” are motivated because of money which will provide some temporary band-aid, providing a moment of security or resource to take care of debt or pay for food (Scheper-Hughes 147). The teamwork associated with luring and finding a donor requires not just one person, but multiple educated experts in all areas of medicine and business. It becomes a very scary thought that the body is seen by some as just a bundle of parts that can be easily broken up and sold. How does a kidney get a price tagged on its value and regulated? “The arguments for regulation are out of touch with the social and medical realities operating in many parts of the world, but especially in second and third world nations” (Scheper-Hughes 160). The articles this week bring up many complex topics, including the multiple frameworks that biomedicine has bounded around “choice,” along with their influence on the various ways to prolong life. While different in many ways compared to organ trafficking, a personal experience that I recently had with biomedicine, surgery and the value of the body were very similar.
Emergency Abdominal Surgery (six hours after leaving anthropology)
Almost 45 days after surgery. |
When your body is trying to survive, your instinct is to do whatever it takes to continuing living. Our bodies are hard-wired to resist death. After having emergency abdominal surgery five months ago, the ideas around my body, medicine and life have shifted and changed. With twenty-seven inches of my colon gone (hemi-colectomy), two tumors and appendix removed, the value of my life became even more sacred. While biomedicine has been a very hot topic in this class, addressing tough issues surrounding power and technology, it saved my life. Just part of the price tag to extend my life: $48, 111.73.
Although I had to believe and trust in the medical team that was taking care of me, I still questioned everything they were doing to my body. Mentally my mind was challenged to get rid of these social norms I had attached to being sick, and let my body express itself as it needed to. For the first time in my life I was physically incapable of doing normal bodily movements, wondering when will I get my “body back.” Was I thinking about the greater good of the people and what was appropriate as I am trying to survive and stay alive? No I wasn’t, but I had a choice, a privileged choice about my body that was influenced by the University of Washington Medical Center. Even though I had a choice, the institution was a huge influence on every decision I made through the ten days of recovery in the hospital, but the months of care at home were left up to me. This only makes me wonder what happens afterward to the people that are donating their body and their organs to keep someone else alive. This surgery for me was the “ultimate extension” of life. I would not be alive today without it, and I would take advantage of the advanced technology that we have at any stage of my life if it would give me the feeling I currently have within my body and mind.
The surgery gave me an extension on life, placed a value on my body parts along with the services the institution deemed appropriate.
First bill that gave a list of what services cost |
What the "extension of life" looks like today |
Works Cited:
- Kaufman, Sharon., Ann J. Russ, and Janet K. Shim. 2006. "Aged Bodies and Kinship Matters: The Ethical Field of Kidney Transplant." American Ethnologist 33 (1): 81-99.
- Scheper-Hughes, Nancy . 2005. "The Last Commodity: Post-Human Ethics and the Global Traffic in ‘Fresh’ Organs." Pp. 145-167. In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
- Lafontaine, Celine , 2009. The Postmortal Condition: From the Biomedical Deconstruction of Death to the Extension of Longevity. Science as Culture 18930: 297-312.
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ReplyDeleteAll the best,
Teo