Questioning Biomedicine’s Privileging of Disease and Measurability, 2021, Kroll

[rvallee]

That is the history of psychobabble and medical science right there.

The idea that ME does not have pathology is also currently absurd. We don't have proof of a univeral core pathology, but there are lots of things objectively wrong with us.

The entire concept of psychosomatic illness also predates the germ theory of disease and modern medicine, and is basically 99% identical to its original construct. Somehow that's always brushed over, in a kind of "ancient wisdom" thing that everyone knows is bunk. It's literally pre-scientific medicine, probably one of the only ideas remaining from before.

 

[TiredSam]

Within biomedicine, the diagnosis of disease is often privileged over a patient’s experience of illness.

From the first sentence I knew exactly where this was coming from. And the following:

patients experiencing such an illness are at increased risk for suspicion, misplaced questioning, or having their motives misinterpreted through damaging social and cultural narratives about gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or disability.

Confirmed it.

Adhering strictly to a biomedical model of thinking about disease and diagnosis

I've only recently come to learn how "anti-science" the ideologies rooted in post modernism are. Science is only one type of knowledge production, which historically has been wrongly privileged over others. They teach this stuff in the classroom next to mine.

I can heartily recommend "Cynical Theories" by Helen Pluckrose for an explanation of what on earth these people are on about.

 

[TiredSam]

I can tell just by the language used that whoever wrote this has been influenced directly or indirectly (by which I mean taught the ideas without knowing where they came from) by Michel Foucault's idea of science as a tool of power to oppress. This random youtube video I just found gives a rough idea:

 

[TiredSam]

Ha! Excuse me wittering on to myself on this thread, but I'm proud to say I've just discovered that I called it 100% correctly. I just clicked on the link in the OP to look at the paper, and skimming over it I found this:

It is important to remember that the medical gaze’s privileging of disease over illness was not the inevitable march of scientific progress. The medical gaze ascended to its current place of power in the 19th century in part due to the professionalization of medicine and its institutionalization in the clinic and in hospitals, as care stopped being delivered in the patient’s home.

The phrase "medical gaze" is straight out of Foucault, and in this paper it is hyperlinked to another paper which begins

Abstract
Understanding the decline in the autopsy rate can be furthered through analysis of Foucault’s idea of the medical gaze and the ancient Greek idea of theoria.

I shall sleep smugly tonight.

Here's something on Foucault's idea of the medical gaze for anyone who's interested:

https://in-training.org/medical-gaze-4170

One of the greatest historians and philosophers of science, Michel Foucault coined an innovative idea to describe this new kind of medicine in his seminal work The Birth of the Clinic: the medical gaze. The medical gaze is a novel way of seeing that involves the physician in a “double system of observation” — one that discovers the disease process and “circumscribes its natural truth.” Under the medical gaze, a person’s “constitution” — the structural body and its functional idiosyncrasies — is a conglomeration that can be traversed by a physician aware of an array of telling signs. The gaze asserts a cognitive relativity, such that the facts about the body are dependent upon the physician’s medical gaze — his sensations, perceptions, experiences, etc. Though subjective by definition, the medical gaze also offers the physician his understanding of the medical knowledge and a foundation for his judgments, so that his knowledge and observation of the body may be made useful.

 

[Michelle]

Here's something on Foucault's idea of the medical gaze for anyone who's interested:

https://in-training.org/medical-gaze-4170

I think Andrew Goddard's remarks as well as Alaistar Miller's on Radio 4 just amply demonstrated that Foucault's concept of the medical gaze was spot on.