Tag Archives: United States

Features

Do Americans suddenly like Obamacare?  Contextualizing opinion polls and media narratives

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“Repeal and replace” has been the rallying cry for opponents of the Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare), the signature domestic policy of the Obama administration that expanded insurance coverage to 20 million people. Opposition to the ACA inspired populist social movements and helped elect Republicans to state and national office. Donald Trump tweeted hundreds of times that Obamacare …

BooksFeatures

‘Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us’ / a conversation with Lochlann Jain

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9780520276574In the Stanford Hospital car park, there is a sign that reads “WARNING: This garage contains gasoline and diesel engine exhaust which is known to the State of California to cause cancer and/or reproductive toxicity.” The paradox is deadly – one runs the risk of developing cancer on their way to cancer treatment. The sign blatantly highlights the starting point …

Books

Janis H. Jenkins’ “Extraordinary Conditions: Culture and Experience in Mental Illness”

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9780520287112Extraordinary Conditions: Culture and Experience in Mental Illness

Janis H. Jenkins

University of California Press, 2015, 343 pages

It has been a privilege, through reading Extraordinary Conditions, to come into contact with a writer and practitioner of extraordinary compassion. The book bears witness to a process of open-ended interviewing that contributed to presenting the lives and experiences of Jenkins’ …

Features

Pharmaceutical Prosthesis and White Racial Rescue in the Prescription Opioid “Epidemic”

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Introduction

A U.S. public discourse of addiction as a disabling psychiatric condition (as opposed to a moral flaw or social deviancy) was codified into Social Security policy in 1972, following its emergence in post-war clinical science and popular media (Conrad & Schneider, 1980; Duster, 1970). In recent years, this discourse has taken divergent forms in policy and media debates surrounding …

Features

My Thoughts While Doing Chest Compressions: Reflections on Care in the Intensive Care Unit from an Intern Physician-Medical Anthropologist

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I was doing chest compressions on a 29-year-old woman who had just come up from the Emergency Room, and I was trying not to look at her face. She was gravely sick, intubated, and we had no idea what was wrong with her. When she went pulseless, we started the American Heart Association’s Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) algorithm for …

Web Roundups

Web Roundup: Who or what is to blame for poverty?

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The heated public debate about poverty, inequality, and discrimination that filled the news and social networks after the protests in Baltimore paints a full picture of just how many possible explanations we have for these problems, yet how little we know about how to change them. This month’s Web Roundup provides a very brief look at the discourses and narratives …