Week 5 - Presentation
Christina Lukban, Pryanka Narayan, Sahar Tai-Seale
ASA189B
Professor Valverde
27 April 2019 Rethinking the Western Health Service
The article Sick Woman is a highly intriguing article as it discusses a salient concept within the United States, health care. Health impacts everyone, but care is not equally accessible. According to Bendix (2018), in 1990 the United States ranked number six in universal health care, in 2018 the number has significantly declined to twenty-seven. Hedva (2016) captures the full essence of this concept with a powerful statement, “ in other words, wellness as it is talked about in America today, is a white and wealthy idea.” The author states health care is commonly segregated by race, class, and gender. For instance, females are often treated less than men in health care. Nationally, the estimated time period a man will wait to be seen for severe abdominal pain is 49 minutes, whereas a woman will have to wait 65 minutes for the same issue. Research has also shown that white people are more likely to listen to other white people when compared to someone of color. This was prevalent in the case of Brock, a thirty-two-year-old black woman who was illegally detained in New York City. Brock was wrongfully accused of driving under the influence, and without any evidence, she was arrested and thrown into a psychiatric ward. In the psychiatric ward, she was wrongfully diagnosed as being bipolar and having high emotions, as she stated Barack Obama followed her on twitter. No one bothered to look into her claims, and she was held against her will for eight days. Within those eight days she was stripped, injected with sedatives, given psychiatric medication, and forced to attend group therapy. When she was released, she was fined $13,637.10, even after evidence was revealed of her telling the truth. The author states how this is an example of the severe impact that occurs when the medical community ignores the please of someone of color. The author continues to state that those who are impacted by severe illnesses, usually don’t have the finanical means for care, and suffer due to no fault of their own. Many become consumed with bills that defy their right to live, and they become trapped in a never-ending cycle. The author pleads for others to understand that being trapped within the confines of chronic illness, is not a choice one makes but endures. They state that when those who ignore the pleas of the ill, are themselves in an unfortunate situation, only then will they understand the dire need of capitalism. Personally, I strongly agree with the author’s stance on health care, I feel like this concept should not be marketed by the wealthy, as it is a crucial component that is needed to survive. While I do understand, the U.S. is more of an individualistic culture, I strongly believe there are issues that are more important than just valuing ones oneself. If we come together as a society, we can eliminate this unnecessary stress,
Room for criticism of the medical industrial complex continues to grow in the film “DMT: The Spirit Molecule”. Dimethyltriptamine (DMT) is a compound found in several genera of plants and has been traced in the archaeological record to have been consumed ceremonially by humans for thousands of years (Pochettino). DMT is an endogenous entheogen, it exists in human and plant bodies naturally and is used to access non-ordinary states of consciousness, often for religious or spiritual purposes. DMT is treated by the Western world as a schedule 1 drug while its use is described as a powerful tool to explore the question, “What is consciousness?” The deeply embedded use of Ayahuasca, an Amazonian plant that produces DMT, by shamans familiar experienced with its properties and of navigating the spiritual trip contextualizes the paradigmatic rift between the community supported systems of folk technology which observe of the nature-human-cosmology triad and of the capital-incentivized Western health care system which omits community-founded traditional guidance in lieu of specific, public and privately incentivized research practices of accredited-institutions. While shamans have been mentored to process the plant and to serve as guides in the spirit realm through and for generations of cultural continuity, the privatization of the pharmaceutical industry within the framework of a Western society that claims state-institutionalized systems of inquiry that value enlightenment, democracy, and science does not allow for localized cultures of spiritual wellness to be accessible or reproducible in an integrated manner, yet. For cultural reasons, the classical compounds like DMT in the nature-human-cosmology triad have been taken off the Western psychiatric clinical bench for 40 years. While what can be approximated as a coherent Western culture is a rigorously enlightenment-investigating system of taxonomizing, dominating and extracting from nature, the spiritual nature and illegality of endogenous compounds demonstrate that a certain darkness-of-ignorance is perpetuated culturally through us in the Western-ruled world. An integration of methods of the nature-human-cosmology triad from indigenous systems of community and environmental regeneration with the Western methods of mechanized order and linear efficiency, seen in the pharmacological industry as an extracting and distilling of psychoactive compounds, could make for a new comprehensive global paradigm that would be revolutionary in its ability to bring together the nature-human-cosmology triad across different traditions of living and learning. However, where legislation, socio-economic organization and power are delegated by capitalist systems that don’t consider the triad in their operations, we are left to perpetuate a culture of being lost in the dark, looking for chance flashes of triadic light to illuminate such a complex interconnected reality.
Citations
Bendix, Aria. “The US Was Once a Leader for Healthcare and Education - Now It Ranks 27th in
the World.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 27 Sept. 2018, www.businessinsider.com/us-ranks-27th-for-healthcare-and-education-2018-9.
Hedva, Johanna. “Sick Woman Theory.” Mask Magazine,
M. L. Pochettino, et al. “Hallucinogenic Snuff from Northwestern Argentina: Microscopical Identification of Anadenanthera Colubrina Var. Cebil (Fabaceae) in Powdered Archaeological Material.” Economic Botany, vol. 53, no. 2, 1999, pp. 127–132. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4256172
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