Design by okb-buro.comArun Bhaiya[1] –Ramesh, I am giving you these medicines. Count them and tell me how many tablets do you have?
Arun Bhaiya throws the seven medicine strips towards Ramesh, standing nearly one-feet away, a printed cotton mask on his face, with hands wide open, sort of like a ball-catching position. The medicine strips slip through his …
An Impossible Inheritance: Postcolonial Psychiatry and the Work of Memory in a West African Clinic
University of California Press, 2019. 288 pages.
Katie Kilroy-Marac begins An Impossible Inheritance with a curious epigraph: “The individual can be said to be ‘tangled up in stories’ which happen to him before any story is recounted.”[1] This statement from Paul Ricoeur’s …
Encountering PrEP
I became interested in PrEP as an object of anthropological research on the L train between 1st and 3rd Avenues in Manhattan. It was the summer of 2014 and the global AIDS industry was humming with renewed biomedical triumphalism, hailing ‘the end of AIDS’ some argued PrEP and other scientific advances had made attainable (Kenworthy, Thomann, …
Background:
Disease stratification practices have long been used as a means to produce and make sense of cancer, distinguishing ‘types’, tumour development stages, and even patients’ sociodemographic profiles. However, interest in stratification; that is, the process of dividing oncology populations into clinically meaningful subtypes, has been re-invigorated by two recent developments in medicine and healthcare. First, an increased awareness of …
Earlier this month, Atul Gawande, physician-author and new CEO of the yet-to-be defined health venture formed by JP Morgan, Berkshire Hathaway, and Amazon, published the long-form New Yorker article, “Why Doctors Hate their Computers.” The article describes rising rates of physician burnout attributed to poor work-life balance, long hours, and exorbitant amounts of time spent on chart review and data …
Lives change dramatically as dementia progresses. Using observations of people suffering from obsessions and compulsions, I will analyse this change along three dimensions.
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is characterised by intrusive anxiety-provoking thoughts (obsessions) and rituals aimed at reducing anxiety, which then paradoxically come to exacerbate it (compulsions). I have been studying clinicians working with people who suffer from a severe, …