Bounding Biomedicine

Bounding Biomedicine PDF Author: Colleen Derkatch
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022634584X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
During the 1990s, unprecedented numbers of Americans turned to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), an umbrella term encompassing health practices such as chiropractic, energy healing, herbal medicine, homeopathy, meditation, naturopathy, and traditional Chinese medicine. By 1997, nearly half the US population was seeking CAM in one form or another, spending at least $27 billion out-of-pocket annually on related products and services. As CAM rose in popularity over the decade, so did mainstream medicine's interest in understanding whether those practices actually worked, and how. Medical researchers devoted considerable effort to testing CAM interventions in clinical trials, and medical educators scrambled to assist physicians in advising patients about CAM. In Bounding Biomedicine, Colleen Derkatch examines how the rhetorical discourse around the published research on this issue allowed the medical profession to maintain its position of privilege and prestige throughout this process, even as its place at the top of the healthcare hierarchy appeared to be weakening. Her research focuses on the ground-breaking and somewhat controversial CAM-themed issues of The Journal of the American Medical Association and its nine specialized Archives journals from 1998, demonstrating how these texts performed rhetorical boundary work for the medical profession. As Derkatch reveals, the question of how to test healthcare practices that don't fit easily (or at all) within mainstream Western medical frameworks sweeps us into the realm of medical knowledge-making--the research teams, clinical trials, and medical journals that determine which treatments are safe and effective--and also out into the world where doctors meet patients, illnesses find treatment, and values, practices, policies, and priorities intersect. Through Bounding Biomedicine, Derkatch shows exactly how narratives of medicine's entanglements with competing models of healthcare shape not only the historical episodes they narrate but also the very fabric of medical knowledge itself and how the medical profession is made and remade through its own discursive activity.

Bounding Biomedicine

Bounding Biomedicine PDF Author: Colleen Derkatch
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022634584X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Get Book Here

Book Description
During the 1990s, unprecedented numbers of Americans turned to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), an umbrella term encompassing health practices such as chiropractic, energy healing, herbal medicine, homeopathy, meditation, naturopathy, and traditional Chinese medicine. By 1997, nearly half the US population was seeking CAM in one form or another, spending at least $27 billion out-of-pocket annually on related products and services. As CAM rose in popularity over the decade, so did mainstream medicine's interest in understanding whether those practices actually worked, and how. Medical researchers devoted considerable effort to testing CAM interventions in clinical trials, and medical educators scrambled to assist physicians in advising patients about CAM. In Bounding Biomedicine, Colleen Derkatch examines how the rhetorical discourse around the published research on this issue allowed the medical profession to maintain its position of privilege and prestige throughout this process, even as its place at the top of the healthcare hierarchy appeared to be weakening. Her research focuses on the ground-breaking and somewhat controversial CAM-themed issues of The Journal of the American Medical Association and its nine specialized Archives journals from 1998, demonstrating how these texts performed rhetorical boundary work for the medical profession. As Derkatch reveals, the question of how to test healthcare practices that don't fit easily (or at all) within mainstream Western medical frameworks sweeps us into the realm of medical knowledge-making--the research teams, clinical trials, and medical journals that determine which treatments are safe and effective--and also out into the world where doctors meet patients, illnesses find treatment, and values, practices, policies, and priorities intersect. Through Bounding Biomedicine, Derkatch shows exactly how narratives of medicine's entanglements with competing models of healthcare shape not only the historical episodes they narrate but also the very fabric of medical knowledge itself and how the medical profession is made and remade through its own discursive activity.

Bodies in Flux

Bodies in Flux PDF Author: Christa Teston
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022645083X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Doctors, scientists, and patients have long grappled with the dubious nature of “certainty” in medical practice. To help navigate the chaos caused by ongoing bodily change we rely on scientific reductions and deductions. We take what we know now and make best guesses about what will be. But bodies in flux always outpace the human gaze. Particularly in cancer care, processes deep within our bodies are at work long before we even know where to look. In the face of constant biological and technological change, how do medical professionals ultimately make decisions about care? Bodies in Flux explores the inventive ways humans and nonhumans work together to manufacture medical evidence. Each chapter draws on rhetorical theory to investigate a specific scientific method for negotiating medical uncertainty in cancer care, including evidential visualization, assessment, synthesis, and computation. Case studies unveil how doctors rely on visuals when deliberating about a patient’s treatment options, how members of the FDA use inferential statistics to predict a drug’s effectiveness, how researchers synthesize hundreds of clinical trials into a single evidence-based recommendation, and how genetic testing companies compute and commoditize human health. Teston concludes by advocating for an ethic of care that pushes back against the fetishization of certainty—an ethic of care that honors human fragility and bodily flux.

Herbs and Roots

Herbs and Roots PDF Author: Tamara Venit Shelton
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300249403
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
An innovative, deeply researched history of Chinese medicine in America and the surprising interplay between Eastern and Western medical practice Chinese medicine has a long history in the United States, with written records dating back to the American colonial period. In this intricately crafted history, Tamara Venit Shelton chronicles the dynamic systems of knowledge, therapies, and materia medica crossing between China and the United States from the eighteenth century to the present. Chinese medicine, she argues, has played an important and often unacknowledged role in both facilitating and undermining the consolidation of medical authority among formally trained biomedical scientists in the United States. Practitioners of Chinese medicine, as racial embodiments of “irregular” medicine, became useful foils for Western physicians struggling to assert their superiority of practice. At the same time, Chinese doctors often embraced and successfully employed Orientalist stereotypes to sell their services to non-Chinese patients skeptical of modern biomedicine. What results is a story of racial constructions, immigration politics, cross-cultural medical history, and the lived experiences of Asian Americans in American history.

Feminist Technical Communication

Feminist Technical Communication PDF Author: Erin Clark
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1646425286
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Feminist Technical Communication introduces readers to technical communication methodology, demonstrating how rhetorical feminist approaches are vital to the future of technical communication. Using an intersectional and transcultural approach, Erin Clark fuses the well-documented surge of work in feminist technical communication throughout the 1990s with the larger social justice turn in the discipline. The first book to situate feminisms and technical communication in relationship as the focal point, Feminist Technical Communication traces the thread of feminisms through technical communication’s connection to social justice studies. Clark theorizes “slow crisis,” a concept made readable to technical communicators by apparent feminisms that can help technical communicators readily recognize and address social justice problems. Clark then applies this framework to the Deepwater Horizon Disaster, an extended crisis that has been publicly framed by a traditional view of efficiency that privileges economic impact. Through rich description of apparent feminist information-gathering techniques and a layered analysis this study offers application far beyond this single disaster, making available new crisis-response possibilities that consider the economy without eliding ecological and human health concerns. Feminist Technical Communication offers a methodological approach to the systematic interrogation of power structures that operate on hidden misogynies. This book is useful to technical communicators, scholars of technical communication and rhetoric, and readers interested in gender studies and public health and is an ideal text for graduate-level seminars focused on feminisms, social justice, and cultural studies.

Methodologies for the Rhetoric of Health & Medicine

Methodologies for the Rhetoric of Health & Medicine PDF Author: Lisa Meloncon
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315303744
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Methodologies for the Rhetoric of Health & Medicine charts new methodological territories for rhetorical studies and the emerging field of the rhetoric of health and medicine. It advances the larger goal of differentiating the rhetoric of health and medicine as a distinct but pragmatically diverse area of study.

Women's Health Advocacy

Women's Health Advocacy PDF Author: Jamie White-Farnham
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429574967
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Women’s Health Advocacy brings together academic studies and personal narratives to demonstrate how women use a variety of arguments, forms of writing, and communication strategies to effect change in a health system that is not only often difficult to participate in, but which can be actively harmful. It explicates the concept of rhetorical ingenuity—the creation of rhetorical means for specific and technical, yet extremely personal, situations. At a time when women’s health concerns are at the center of national debate, this rhetorical ingenuity provides means for women to uncover latent sources of oppression in women’s health and medicine and to influence matters of research, funding, policy, and everyday access to healthcare in the face of exclusion and disenfranchisement. This accessible collection will be inspiring reading for academics and students in health communication, medical humanities, and women’s studies, as well as for activists, patients, and professionals.

Interrogating Gendered Pathologies

Interrogating Gendered Pathologies PDF Author: Erin Clark
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607329859
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Interrogating Gendered Pathologies points out and critiques unjust patterns of pathology. Erin A. Frost and Michelle F. Eble assemble a transdisciplinary approach from/to technologies, rhetorics, philosophies, epistemologies, and biomedical data to consider the effects of biomedicine’s gendered norms on people’s lives. Using a range of complementary and intersectional theoretical approaches, contributors ask questions about rhetoric’s role in healthcare and how it differs depending on patient embodiment and the ways nonnormative bodies are pathologized. These chapters engage common narratives about the ways in which gender in healthcare is secondary and highlights the stories of people who have battled to prioritize their own bodies through extraordinary difficulties. Employing a multiplicity of voices, the book represents a number of different perspectives on what it might look like to return health and medical data to embodied experience, to consider the effects of gendered and intersectional biomedical norms on lived realities, and to subvert the power of institutions in ways that move us toward biomedical justice. This collection contributes to the burgeoning field of health and medical rhetorics by rhetorically and theoretically intervening in what are often seen as objective and neutral decisions related to the body and to scientific and medical data about bodies. Interrogating Gendered Pathologies will be of interest to feminist scholars in the field of rhetoric and writing studies, specifically those in the rhetorics of health and medicine, as well as scholars of technical communication, feminist studies, gender studies, technoscience studies, and bioethics. Contributors: Leslie Anglesey, Mary Assad, Beth Boser, Lillian Campbell, Marleah Dean, Lori Beth De Hertogh, Leandra Hernandez, Elizabeth Horn-Walker, Caitlin Leach, Jordan Liz, Miriam Mara, Cathryn Molloy, Kerri Morris, Maria Novotny, Sage Perdue, Colleen Reilly

From Hysteria to Hormones

From Hysteria to Hormones PDF Author: Amy Koerber
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271081570
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
In From Hysteria to Hormones, Amy Koerber examines the rhetorical activity that preceded the early twentieth-century emergence of the word hormone and the impact of this word on expert understandings of women’s health. Shortly after Ernest Henry Starling coined the term “hormone” in 1905, hormones began to provide a chemical explanation for bodily phenomena that were previously understood in terms of “wandering wombs,” humors, energies, and balance. In this study, Koerber posits that the discovery of hormones was not so much a revolution as an exigency that required old ways of thinking to be twisted, reshaped, and transformed to fit more scientific turn-of-the-century expectations of medical practices. She engages with texts from a wide array of medical and social scientific subdisciplines; with material from medical archives, including patient charts, handwritten notes, and photographs from the Salpêtrière Hospital, where Dr. Jean Charcot treated hundreds of hysteria patients in the late nineteenth century; and with current rhetorical theoretical approaches to the study of health and medicine. In doing so, Koerber shows that the boundary between older, nonscientific ways of understanding women’s bodies and newer, scientific understandings is much murkier than we might expect. A clarifying examination of how the term “hormones” preserves key concepts that have framed our understanding of women’s bodies from ancient times to the present, this innovative book illuminates the ways in which the words we use today to discuss female reproductive health aren’t nearly as scientifically accurate or socially progressive as believed. Scholars of rhetoric, gender studies, and women’s health will find Koerber’s work provocative and valuable.

Through a Vegan Studies Lens

Through a Vegan Studies Lens PDF Author: Laura Wright
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
ISBN: 1948908115
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Interest in the vegan studies field continues to grow as veganism has become increasingly visible via celebrity endorsements and universally acknowledged health benefits, and veganism and vegan characters are increasingly present in works of art and literature. Through a Vegan Studies Lens broadens the scope of vegan studies by engaging in the mainstream discourse found in a wide variety of contemporary works of literature, popular cultural representations, advertising, and news media. Veganism is a practice that allows for environmentally responsible consumer choices that are viewed, particularly in the West, as oppositional to an economy that is largely dependent upon big agriculture. This groundbreaking collection exposes this disruption, critiques it, and offers a new roadmap for navigating and reimaging popular culture representations on veganism. These essays engage a wide variety of political, historical, and cultural issues, including contemporary political and social circumstances, emergent veganism in Eastern Europe, climate change, and the Syrian refugee crisis, among other topics. Through a Vegan Studies Lens significantly furthers the conversation of what a vegan studies perspective can be and illustrates why it should be an integral part of cultural studies and critical theory. Vegan studies is inclusive, refusing to ignore the displacement, abuse, and mistreatment of nonhuman animals. It also looks to ignite conversations about cultural oppression.

Forget Burial

Forget Burial PDF Author: Marty Fink
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978813767
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Queers and trans people in the 1980s and early '90s were dying of AIDS and the government failed to care. Lovers, strangers, artists, and community activists came together take care of each other in the face of state violence.These early HIV care-giving narratives continue to shape how we understand our genders and our disabilities, forming ongoing chosen families for body self-determination.