Playing God: Interpreting The Doctor’s Dilemma Set Design at Shaw Festival 2010

In the sociology of medicine Parson (1951) regarded medicine as functional in social terms. By tackling the person’s problems in medical terms the tendency towards deviance that was represented by ill health could be safely directed, until they could return to their normal self. (Lawrence 1994: p 64-65: BMJ 2004: Parson cited in Gabe, Bury & Elston 2006, p 127).

1. Throughout history, a number of reformers have sought to improve the quality of medical care. What common thread connects them? Why did some fail? What were the successful able to see/do that others weren’t?

Unfair competition and socialism amongst physicians and medical students emerged as medicine advanced and health departments were formed. “Nurses in schools were resisted by physicians who would lose some patients if they were cared for at school--city (New York City Health Department) pointed out that they would gain more patients by referral--physicians prevented them from doing any significant medical care.” (Starr.) The demand for care increased as the use of checkups and health exams--insurance, job, school became more commonly used in day-to-day practice. Chapter 5 also introduced a new idea of germ theory, “in the first half of the nineteenth century, some authorities attributed epidemics to cotagonian and recommended quarantines-an ecomonically damaging measure.”

During the 1800s, there was several diseases affecting people left and right. “Diseases such as tuberculosis, smallpox, measles, chickenpox, cholera, whooping cough and influenza, among others” (“1800s: My Place, Diseases”) were some of the known diseases that would cripple or cause death to multiple people. Often Plantation owners and their slaves would have the same diseases, but plantation owners had a higher chance at surviving than slaves did. Doctors would prescribe the same treatment to anyone with a disease, usually natural herbs or bleeding out. Doctors from England that lived in America could no longer visit England for medical advice after the Revolutionary War, so several doctors started to improvise with many different remedies

Henderson, a well known transplant specialist. Dr. Henderson believes medicine in the United States has become a repetitive system of doctors who prescribe patients with similar symptoms generic prescriptions, whether it is surgery or just a medicine, instead of focusing on the individual patient’s needs. He believes the inflation of medical care costs are associated with doctors doing the same thing over and over again. I can personally relate to this because, in February of 2015, I was emitted into the hospital due to excruciating stomach pains. The doctors did not know what was wrong with me, but after I was in the emergency room for over 48 hours, they decided to take out my appendix. Before I went into the surgery, the surgeon reassured me and my parents by saying she has done this surgery hundreds of times, proving an appendectomy is a go-to surgery for stomach pain. The uncertainty of the success of the surgery resolving the problem worried me and my family. Luckily, the surgery did eliminate the preexisting pain. If it had not, however, my parents would have been out thousands of dollars that would go directly to the surgeon’s pockets. Socialized medicine would be able to resolve problems like this one by increasing the quality, safety, and outcomes of each procedure. Dr. Henderson uses the example of Scotland to explain how socialized medicine increased the quality, safety, and outcomes of each procedure. Compared to the United States, Scotland is a lot more advanced medically. The United States can get to Scotland’s level of healthcare by adopting a program of socialized medicine similar to

In the world that we live in today, many people would find it difficult to imagine living in a world where medicine and treatment are not readily available. The replacement of religious explanations to medical and scientific explanations has become a means of social control. If a person is in pain, they can easily set up an appointment with a doctor and receive some sort of medical diagnosis. However, there are certain instances where a problem has not been medicalized, or recognized as a medical problem, and their issue will be dismissed completely. The movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest delves into the idea of medicalization and how it can be used for the good, or for the bad, in terms of the “sick role.” Medicalization in the

The overall health conditions of people reflect the quality of medical treatment they are receiving. Based on that statement, Elizabethan England medical practices must have been fairly ineffective. “Nonetheless, the prevalence of disease and the primitive level of medicine meant that illness could easily end a life long before its prime. Life expectancy at birth was only about forty-eight years, although anyone who made it through the first thirty years was likely to live for another thirty.” This quote can be contrasted with modern life expectancies to exemplify how significant the difference really is.

“ Cure her of that, canst thou not minister to a mind diserased. Pluck the memory of a rooted sorrow” ( Macbeth, V, III ). In Macbeth, Medicine is being brought up to cure his wife of her sleep walking in the story, due to the fact that she is feeling really overwhelmed by guilt over the fact she know and had a hand in Macbeth dirty doing, his first choice is to have the doctor curing Lady Macbeth with medicine, nothing else but that it seems. You would think Macbeth would of have gone crazy and helped out his wife or to turn himself in so his wife didn’t have to go through so much guilt. Never the less, Pharmaceuticals are used as our first source of help weather that be for sleep, pain, high, or just to take them to be noticed, they are abused

”To seek to ease pain is natural” (Silverburg, 16). Since the beginning of time mankind has struggle with disease, wound, and death; thus men try to find relief in those pain kindle the flame towards medication. Countless civilization tries their hand at medication, China and Greece both sought to find way in ending disease and sickness, however most people at the time believed disease and pain are cause by gods or other mythological being and superstition. This concept of thinking remained unchanged until 460 B.C.E in Athens Greece when Hippocrates came in and introduces the notion of modern medicine and treatment. Hippocrates broke many groundbreaking achievement in regarding medicine such as the brain controlling thoughts and emotion but what he was remember for is taking out the superstition aspect in medicine and treatment by many people and taking a scientific and logical approach (Downey, 2).

Doctors are not as a matter of course anticipated that would experience this expansive meaning of beneficence.an illustration is resuscitating a suffocating casualty. On the other hand, no-maleficence intends "no mischief." Physicians must avoid giving inadequate medications or acting with noxiousness toward patients. This standard, in any case, offers minimal helpful direction to doctors subsequent to numerous valuable treatments likewise have genuine dangers. The appropriate moral issue is whether the advantages exceed the weights. Doctors ought not to give insufficient medicines to patients as these offer danger with no probability of advantage and along these lines have a possibility of hurting patients (Gabaldón & Aguilera, 2008). Moreover, doctors should not do anything that would intentionally hurt patients without the activity being adjusted by relative advantage. Since numerous solutions, systems, and intercessions reason hurt notwithstanding advantage, the rule of non-perniciousness gives minimal solid direction under the watchful eye of patients. An illustration from my practice is halting a solution that is appeared to be destructive

The conceptualisation of medicine as an institution of societal control was first theorised by Parsons (1951), and from this stemmed the notion of the deviant termed illness in which the “sick role” was a legitimised condition. The societal reaction and perspective was deemed a pillar of the emerging social construction of disease and conception of the formalised medical model of disease. Concerns surrounding medicalisation fundamentally stem from the fusion of social and medical concerns wherein the lines between the two are gradually blurred and the the social consequences of the proliferation of disease diagnosis that results from such ambiguities of the social medical model.

It is argued that patients requesting help with hastening death come mostly from those who have not been treated or diagnosed properly (Asch). “There is a growing awareness that loss of dignity and of those attributes that we associate particularly with being human are the factors that most commonly reduce patients to a state of unrelieved misery and desperation,” (Rogatz). It would be to the doctor’s discretion and expertise to diagnose and treat the patient to the best of their ability, and the patient could seek assistance from another doctor if looking for more

Townsend and Davidson (1988) also suggested that the term health is derived from the word “whole”, which is a recipient of the healing process. Therefore, an attempt to heal or cure in medical field literally means, to make whole or restore health. It is this idea that influences medicine to adopt a mechanistic approach towards disease management thereby obscuring the understanding of health in human context of well-being, which advocates for alternative or complementary approaches. This viewpoint also reflects in some definitions and the medical model discussed above. The criticisms of the medical by Illich (1974) is that the medical view only deals with the cause of disease or illness rather than the external factors affecting the person’s health. Within different sections of medicine, for example the mental health department, there are marked differences when explaining the origin of illness, disease and treatments.

People who use medications often incorporate those drugs into their life in a variety of ways. For some, it is a life-saving that must be used in order to live. But for others, such as my informant, Amanda, some drugs that are not necessary for life have become equated as a “staple” item. Staple items by definition are “a main or important element of something, especially of a diet, such as bread, milk, etc.,” (dictionary.com). However, in her life, she has come to define the pain relieving drug, Advil, as “staple” for her health. Thus, the goal of my paper is to trace what caused Advil to become tantamount with necessary nourishment. Through the analysis of Amanda’s experience with pain, I will examine how both models of health are enacted as she takes Advil, which have come to change the biomedical intended purpose to a “staple” of life. To further my analysis, I will be referencing Joseph Dumit’s book, Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health, Mol and Law’s paper, “Embodied Action, Enacted Bodies: The Example of Hypoglycemia,” and Clara Han’s chapter, “Labor Instability and Community Mental Health: The Work of Pharmaceuticals in Santiago, Chile.”

Written about the structure and culture of biomedical heath care and a society that is attempting to prolong aging, Medicare funding, funding and development of research, and today’s definition of standard care, Sharon Kaufman brings to light the many dilemmas posed to the American health care system. Her ethnographic story, Ordinary Medicine: Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives and Where to Draw the Line reveals the booming biomedical research and clinical trials industry, the power held by Medicare and private insurance, and a rapidly changing standard of care once a medical treatment is considered reimbursable. This leads to systematic changes in the standard of care result in a massive amount of pressure being placed upon doctors, patients and families to make an ethically and medically sound decision in refusing or accepting therapy. Kaufman exposes the driving forces behind the expansion of biomedicine, society’s response to the growing industry on a personal and bureaucratic level.