Drawbacks of medicine

Anne Fadiman’s “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” makes so many excellent points about modern medicine, the biomedicine model, and the importance of cultural in medicine. One of the most interesting points that I think that the book makes is the importance of negotiating one’s belief system with one’s medical treatment. Fadiman presented Neil Ernst as a capable and caring doctor, however, I think that she personally agrees with the type of doctor that Roger Fife tries to be. Ultimately, I do not think that Roger Fife is compromising treatment when he simplifies treatments and medications according to certain cultural traditions of the patients. To have simplified Lia’s medication regime may have meant saving her brain function because her parents would have agreed to give her the medicine on a consistent and regular basis. However, I understand that to make such a statement is pure speculation and that Lia’s grand mal seizure was actually caused by septic shock and not by her parents’ failure to administer the medications properly.

Also, I thought a lot about Fadiman’s book during my PE 101 lecture on Tuesday. As many of you have had the pure joy of taking PE 101, you may remember the speaker on living with AIDS. The speaker (his name is Jamey) talked about his twenty year struggle with being infected with AIDS and how he had been under the care of doctors for AIDS since September of 1987. At the end of his lecture, Jamey opened the floor to questions and one student asked him about his medications. Throughout the lecture, Jamey had been animated and upbeat, but when answering the question, he smiled and said that he had to take about five pills a day for AIDS and two “mental health” pills because “sometimes the other medicine gives me the blues.” I thought a long time about Fadiman’s book and the overall effectiveness of medicine about Jamey’s lecture. Obviously, Jamey needed the AIDS medication to live, but the medication had drawbacks, just as Lia’s medications did on her personality (it made her hyperactive.)