Description
Book SynopsisThis account of the author's experience with a chronic pain disorder and subsequent interaction with the American health care system goes to the heart of the workings of power and culture in the biomedical domain, illustrating medicine's power to create and inflict suffering.
Trade Review"A very useful and very well written book....It states the issues in the culture of the biomedicine field effectively and makes them relevant." - Arthur Kleinman, author of Writing at the Margin: Discourse between Anthropology and Medicine "Far above a simple telling of an illness, Greenhalgh takes the experience as a way to view gendered relations in medical care, the seduction of science for the physician and the patient, and the creation of facts and selves in the treatment of pain. She sets a new standard for the practice of autoethnography." - Virginia Olesen, Professor Emerita of Sociology, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, School of Nursing, University of California, San Francisco. "This is an extraordinary book - riveting story, concise scholarship, experimental ethnography - and it is beautifully told. Greenhalgh makes a cogent and powerful analysis of the sociopolitical sources of pain through feminist, cultural, and political understandings of the nature of medical science and medical practice in the United States." - Sharon Kaufman, author of The Healer's Tale: Transforming Medicine and Culture"
Table of ContentsList of Tables and Figures Acknowledgments PART ONE: Understanding Chronic Pain Preface Problematique Prologue: Finding Dr. Right PART TWO: Doing Biomedicine 1 The Initial Consultation: The Making of a "Fibromyalgic" 2 Medicating the "Fibromyalgic"-Arthritic Body 3 Producing the Good Patient PART THREE: Doing Gender 4 A Most Pleasant Patient 5 Silent Rebellion and Rage 6 A Depression Worse Than the Disease PART FOUR: A Losing Battle to Get Better 7 Struggling To Make the Treatment Work 8 "Accept It!" Alternative Medicines Offer Medicine for the Mind 9 A Life Shrunk, a Mind Gone Nearly Mad PART FIVE: Rebellion and Self-Renewal 1 A Second Opinion: The Unmaking of a "Fibromyalgic" 11 The Final Meeting: A Tale of Decline and a Denial 12 Out from under the Medical Gaze PART SIX: Narrating Illness, Politicizing Pain Conclusion: Re-viewing the Medicine of Chronic Pain Epilogue: Speaking of Pain -- On Stories, Cultural Recuperations, and Political Interventions Notes References Index
