The ability to experience pain and suffering are universally and innately part of human ideology. Margaret Lock and Nancy Scheper-Hughes situate human affliction as mutually constructed by biological, social, and cultural understandings of the body. Both anthropologists advocate for a comprehensive perspective regarding illness and disease in which knowledge of and explanatory models referring to an individual’s illness are fixed on a greater social, political, and cosmic influences. Apparent identical life events can be explained by purely contradictory understandings of the body; pain, suffering and death simply cannot be explained in a manner that lacks the wider context of culture and society. Byron Good’s “How medicine constructs its
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Explaining this situation as epilepsy led American doctors to prescribe Lia with heavy medication, raised concerns from her parents due to their different conception of their child’s illness (161). Under the veil of Hmong culture, Lia Lee’s parents understood her epilepsy as evidence of “soul loss,” which further implies possible benefits for a Hmong community in question if Lia should reach the coveted position of a shaman. Her parents’ understanding of her pain and suffering in a positive manner reflects upon their belief in a larger, spiritual order in which an individual’s body cannot be separated her culture. Therefore, seeking spiritual guidance in the form of “herbal remedies and services of a Hmong shaman” heavily reiterates the underlying connection between that of Lia’s condition and the spiritual beliefs that exist within Hmong culture (161). Regardless of this specific cultural and spiritual knowledge, the biomedical approach, one that the western doctors forced upon Lia despite existing language barriers, forsakes the potential to better understand how these aspects of clinical encounters influence individual cases and how to better provide care for the suffering …show more content…
Cultures have different views and traditions about death, and there have been significant debates about the determination of death by neurologic criteria. The acceptance and diagnosis of brain death originates from the Ad Hoc Committee of Harvard Medical School, whom “declared unilaterally that individuals in a state of ‘irreversible coma’… could be declared dead” (2). This concept on death and the role of healthcare providers extends beyond the medical world, as recent development has made it possible to pro-long life through resuscitative and support measures. As a result, it has legally redefined death by setting brain-death, rather than cessation of heart and lung function, as the standard for death. The reluctance in Japan to practice organ harvesting is influenced by their traditional values, which Lock depicts from a case in which a physician “was arrested for murder” following attempts to perform a heart transplant in Sapporo, Hokkaido (8). The controversy over the patient’s death reflects on the political order within Japanese society, under which a lack of trust in the medical profession has raised questions on the misdiagnosis of brain death and necessity for organ retrieval. However, missing in this discussion was the informed consent relayed on the family, over which a surgeon responded, “it didn’t even occur to me to tell the
Explaining this situation as epilepsy led American doctors to prescribe Lia with heavy medication, raised concerns from her parents due to their different conception of their child’s illness (161). Under the veil of Hmong culture, Lia Lee’s parents understood her epilepsy as evidence of “soul loss,” which further implies possible benefits for a Hmong community in question if Lia should reach the coveted position of a shaman. Her parents’ understanding of her pain and suffering in a positive manner reflects upon their belief in a larger, spiritual order in which an individual’s body cannot be separated her culture. Therefore, seeking spiritual guidance in the form of “herbal remedies and services of a Hmong shaman” heavily reiterates the underlying connection between that of Lia’s condition and the spiritual beliefs that exist within Hmong culture (161). Regardless of this specific cultural and spiritual knowledge, the biomedical approach, one that the western doctors forced upon Lia despite existing language barriers, forsakes the potential to better understand how these aspects of clinical encounters influence individual cases and how to better provide care for the suffering …show more content…
Cultures have different views and traditions about death, and there have been significant debates about the determination of death by neurologic criteria. The acceptance and diagnosis of brain death originates from the Ad Hoc Committee of Harvard Medical School, whom “declared unilaterally that individuals in a state of ‘irreversible coma’… could be declared dead” (2). This concept on death and the role of healthcare providers extends beyond the medical world, as recent development has made it possible to pro-long life through resuscitative and support measures. As a result, it has legally redefined death by setting brain-death, rather than cessation of heart and lung function, as the standard for death. The reluctance in Japan to practice organ harvesting is influenced by their traditional values, which Lock depicts from a case in which a physician “was arrested for murder” following attempts to perform a heart transplant in Sapporo, Hokkaido (8). The controversy over the patient’s death reflects on the political order within Japanese society, under which a lack of trust in the medical profession has raised questions on the misdiagnosis of brain death and necessity for organ retrieval. However, missing in this discussion was the informed consent relayed on the family, over which a surgeon responded, “it didn’t even occur to me to tell the