Books, Books, and more Books!

So I went on an Amazon frenzy and ordered a crap ton of books to read during Spring Break. There were just so many that kept on coming in and let's get real - I slept most of my break away. One of the books I read, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, is in its simplest description, a medical anthropological undertaking. It describes a story of a Hmong (pronounced 'Mong,' but 'Huh-mong.') family with a sick child and their numerous encounters with the US healthcare system. 

I won't give a detailed summary but it essentially highlights the cultural context of US-trained physicians and their increasingly diverse patient population. As I read the story, I just grew angry, sad, depressed, appalled, shocked... then I realized that what I was reading was not new information. How many articles have I read since undergrad that focused on the shortcomings of Western biomedicine? The lack of cultural competency, the horrendous bedside manner and nonexistent communication skills, etc. And who suffers? Everyone. The patient, the patient's family, the family's community, and the medical staff. When patients do poorly, it affects the physicians, nurses, and the entire healthcare team. Or so I think it does. I think poor outcomes take an emotional toll on hospital staff. At the end of the book, I wondered if Lia Long's condition could've been avoided had there been "cultural benchmarks" along the way that addressed Hmong beliefs. 

Then I read another book, Lost in Translation, which was still anthropologically-related but a very different substantive content. The author is a researcher who studied everyday Bulgarians who described what life was like as their country shifted from a communist state to a democratic capitalist state, seemingly overnight. I think part of my interest in political ethnography was from watching FX's The Americans - a show about a KGB husband-wife team living in the US. This stemmed from watching a History Channel special on the US Presidents, and I was curious about the Reagan era, the Cold War, the influence and dominance of the USSR. My logic seems a bit all over the place, but they're connected.

Lost in Translation told the stories of people who gave a different perspective about life in a socialist state. We're so quick to judge the evils of socialism and communism in the US, but the author does a fantastic job of showing just how terrible the transition was from socialism to capitalism. The transition wasn't seamless and not everyone seemed to benefit from the free market. Fast forward to the 21st century and surveys show that people, both old and young, in the former communist bloc still pine for the old days of a totalitarian communist government. The book suggests that society may in fact come full circle.

Reading these two seemingly disparate books both angers and annoys me. In today's technological age, we have so much scientific capability to alleviate so much pain and suffering, but it also cripples us. How? Why? Because people don't know how to fucking talk to people who are different from themselves. Just because something isn't numerically and statistically quantifiable, Western medicine marginalizes this Otherness to something that is undesirable and threatening. 

Then I think about a classmate who is interested in international development and consulting and the frustrations she's encountered with people coming into the field with high expectations that are never met. Does all this change really get us anywhere? Is there hope? Or is everything we do futile? From a political standpoint, whether it's a democracy or communism, it seems like power inevitably corrupts. Even in communism, where the wealth is supposed to be distributed equally, those in power essentially recreate hierarchies that expose the hypocrisy of communism (Ghodsee). 

These are all rhetorical questions that I've been asking myself. Maybe there's a way I can combined politics, medicine, and anthropology together. How is the public (i.e. patients) affected by the politics of healthcare? I wouldn't want to study the overtly political nature of say, the Affordable Care Act, and the cost-benefit analysis of all it entails... but I want to hear narratives, first-person experiences of everyday people who have to interact with healthcare systems. Given my interest in global health, maybe I could study patient experiences in different healthcare systems. There's already so much done on the economics, the financing and delivery, the political bullshit, etc... but what about the voices of the people and professionals who have to work within the confines of whatever health system they're in? 

That's my rant for now. Time to read Paul Farmer's Pathologies of Power!