This hospital has a c-section rate that is well above what the World Health Organization deems a safe c-section rate; if women are consenting to a c-section right off the bat (not to mention fetal heart-rate monitoring, antibiotics, episiotomies, and epidurals!) regardless of whether one is actually medically indicated, it’s certainly blurring the lines between what’s medically necessary and the power of suggestion from a medical “authority.” Where does an individual’s right to make an informed choice begin and hospital legal policy end?

— Does Refusing a C-Section = Child Abuse? [via]

Quick — what is the “paradigm” of medicine, to which my correspondents claim to be alternative? Give up? Good for you, because there isn’t one. People are complicated and there are all sorts of entirely different things that can go wrong. Physicians don’t fall back on a paradigm to fix everything, they do whatever is likely to work. Antibiotics, surgical excision of tumors, hormonal therapy, receptor blockers, physical therapy, nutrition, prostheses, cancer chemotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, social support, surgical repair of joint trauma, monoclonal antibodies, antivirals, vaccinations, and so on and so forth, are all specific ways of addressing various, often entirely unrelated problems.
The only “paradigm” physicians worry about is whether something works or not. The way you find that out is to subject it to rigorous testing. It’s often helpful to understand as much as possible about the underlying biological processes that are making a person sick. It can help guide an efficient search for new therapies, and help select the right one for a particular case. But it isn’t always necessary — some remedies are just “empirical,” as they say, i.e. they are known to work but people aren’t sure why. Doctors aren’t above using these, even if they’d generally prefer to know what’s going on.

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Alternative Healing Paradigms

tip: paradigms (like privilege!) may be hard to see when you are immersed in them.

I find it truly bizarre when I talk to people (okay if we’re being real the only people that really rile me up when they do this are MDs/med students) who are convinced that there is not cultural/moral/social influence on biomedicine, but rather all truth/behavior/procedure/therapies are derived from pure empirical research. Why aren’t y’all reading Kuhn?

Adequate medical care has been a constant concern of anti-primitivists. They have decided that a desire to scale back the intrusion of industrial medicine equals sentencing thousands—if not millions—of people to death, either from lack of any medical care, from starvation, or both. In terms of the medical issue, who are the people whose lives would be in jeopardy in an anarcho-primitivist future? People in renal failure without access to dialysis? People who have to be fed through gastric tubes? People who can’t breathe without being attached to ventilators? Those who are dependent on other interventionist medical procedures like organ transplants? What about the nearly two-hundred thousand who die annually through misdiagnosis, incorrect drug therapy; through negligence or by accident in hospitals, rehabilitation facilities, skilled nursing homes (etc); from botched operations and/or exposure to contagious pathogens? Is there really no decent anarchist critique of the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, with its reliance on LD-50 protocols, animal experimentation, a plethora of injurious or deadly so-called side effects and other unintended results?
It is implied by anti-primitivist anarchists that infections (acne and sepsis?) are inevitably and invariably fatal—an annoyingly typical canard. Those who make this allegation have no understanding of healing techniques among non-civilized humans or the continual use of plant medicines by rural and urban dwellers, not to mention the documented 4000 year-old history of Traditional Asian Medicine. Studies of ethnobotanists and anthropologists overflow with examples of the long-standing use of plant medicines to treat everything from headaches and insomnia to hemorrhages and, yes, infections. Archaeologists have found skeletal remains of early humans who’ve clearly been seriously injured and who survived for years after.
Anti-primitivists who fear life-threatening medical issues also have no comprehension of the history and practice of allopathy—mislabeled Western Medicine by those who share the assumptions of Euro-American colonialism. Aside from being a relatively recent innovation, allopathy as a healing modality allopathy derives many of its successes specifically from military medicine, especially in trauma care. Allopaths tend to be authoritarian, basing their ameliorative treatments on perhaps the strictest division of labor of modern civilization, that between healer and patient. Allopathy is expansionist; its practitioners and protectors continually strive to supplant and/or suppress all other healing modalities. And it is infantilizing; patients are removed from the knowledge and ability to decide upon the course of their own treatments. Allopaths are certainly successful; thousands of their patients are healed, and lives are extended. But is the quantity of those extra years, months, and days in various kinds of debilitating treatments (like chemotherapy or dialysis among others) comparable to the quality of an unalienated, unmediated life—however short(er)? Health concerns seem paramount to most anti-primitivist anarchists, yet there also seems to be no concurrent analysis of the mainstream medical establishment and its inherent and attendant institutions of social control.
By way of contrast, Native American, African, Asian (Traditional and non-traditional), and European herbal healing has a much longer tradition, and is based on empirical progress through trial and error of both practitioners and those with ailments. Probably beginning with observing other animals in their environs, humans have had an extensive plant-based pharmacopeia for almost as long as we have been around as an identifiable species—and some paleo-anthropologists argue that the use of medicinal foods, like the use of fire, has been an integral part of hominid prehistory.

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Why I Am Not An Anti Primitivist

While there are certainly many horrible things about biomedicine, it seems really exotifying to assume that all of these other medical systems are equally efficacious with none of the downsides. All medicines/biologies have upsides and downsides.

But then, the author would probably classify me as anti-primitivist (i mean, just start with the name on the list of problems) anyway, so obv I would find fault in this reasoning.

Excuse me if I do not partake in all of the celebration of The 50th Anniversary of The Pill because from my perspective it is still very much a reminder of the exploitation and violation of human rights among Puerto Ricans (and Haitians, and working class women in general) that continues today. Ignoring this reality is easy. Yet, it is a part of my, our history that I can’t simply forget or overlook. If I choose to ignore this history I also choose to ignore the history of activism by members of my community that has helped to create change at an institutional level. Ignoring this reality and history also perpetuates the ideas that historically oppressed communities are not important in the work we do today. There are some things I’m not ready to ignore or forge and many of those are the power of language. The adjectives used to describe members of my community are horrifying. I don’t care if it was how people spoke “in that time,” they were and remain inappropriate. To describe our homeland as “slums,” “jungles,” and our community as “undesirable,” “genetically inferior,” and “ignorant” is defendable? The ideology “that the poor, uneducated, women of Puerto Rico could follow the Pill regimen, then women anywhere in the world could too” is not condescending to you? Don’t be fooled. There was almost nothing that was “female controlled” or “empowering” about being a part of the trial for many participants, especially after they realized they were taking a medication that they did not know was not approved.

— Why I’m Not Celebrating the Pill [via]

One of the things I don’t want people to take from the story is the idea that tissue culture is bad. So much of medicine today depends on tissue culture. HIV tests, many basic drugs, all of our vaccines—we would have none of that if it wasn’t for scientists collecting cells from people and growing them. And the need for these cells is going to get greater, not less. Instead of saying we don’t want that to happen, we just need to look at how it can happen in a way that everyone is OK with.

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Henrietta Lacks’ ‘Immortal’ Cells

My job revolves pretty significantly on collecting tissue specimens JUST LIKE THIS from people (except we do have a written consent form, we don’t just do it on the DL). Prior to starting this job I had no idea how prolific this is. We have 20+ years of tissue specimens at our facility (not necessary living like these, although we do have cell lines and do collect specimens for researchers that are creating tumor cell lines) and institutions have tissue banks/archives that go back decades. Pretty interestnig.

Oh and about that consent I mentioned.. our institution has only been obtaining consent for these activities for like 5 years. Its pretty amazing to me how entitled biomedical institutions can feel to parts of patients bodies. This article is a great example of that. As tremendous as the advances are that have been made at the expense of marginalized and unconsented/unconsulted bodies are, I feel fairly confident saying that they aren’t worth it. Its not that hard to take the extra step of informing and obtaining consent.