Ultimately, auto-authorization is anathema to medical/ science philosophy and practice in the current patriarchal capitalist system from whence it sprouted—or rather, co-evolved with, as if a scion from an oppressive rootstock.
It’s been a minute since my last post, I know. My only excuse is that institutional bureaucratic intensity has recently gone from about a six to a ten, on the pain rating scale. Let this pain rating scale, then, be my point of departure for launching into the topic at hand: auto-authorization in biosciences. Biosciences includes biomedicine, with applications to medicine in general, so, a good starting point.
Ultimately, auto-authorization is anathema to medical/ science philosophy and practice in the current patriarchal capitalist system from whence it sprouted—or rather, co-evolved with, as if a scion from an oppressive rootstock. I am making a Pharmakon reference here, which I will expand upon shortly, but first, a personal example of what I refer to with the pain rating scale:
Anyone who has gone through a hospital outpatients intake process has likely been triaged with a series of baseline questions regarding their health status; these might include giving a subjective interpretation of present pain on a rating scale from one to ten, with ten being the most severe. The last time I was asked to do this was when I stepped on a (presumed) wasp nest with my bare feet whilst traipsing around my cousin’s farm. I thought it wise to get a tetanus shot since I couldn’t verify what exactly had punctured the bottom of my foot. In the emergency room reception cubicle, the intake nurse pointed to a laminated poster on the Blu-Tac speckled wall next to her, and instructed me to pick a number to represent the feeling in my swollen foot.1
I’ve had my experiences of physical pain dismissed by medical professionals often enough to have been permanently gaslit into a default dissociation when it comes to communicating my feelings to a scrubs- or lab coat-clad person with a clipboard. For example, I suffered a spinal fracture that resulted in severe hip tendinitis, painful to the point of tears involuntarily streaming down my face. When I sought medical attention, a nitrile-gloved hand was waved in my face whilst the doctor declared incredulously that, “It can’t be that bad.” I didn’t know my spine had been fractured until a year later when a chest x-ray for pneumonia revealed the crushed vertebrae. I have also given vaginal birth, with the attending nurse hissing into my ear that if I didn’t stop screaming like a wild animal, they’d wheel me across the hall for a C-section. A final example: experiencing the core-deep agony of pericarditis (or whatever cardiovascular havoc it was) caused by COVID-19 infection, whilst being contemptuously informed that it couldn’t possibly be COVID-related and nothing was wrong except for my (female) anxiety.2 All of this is to say that when asked to rate my foot puncture pain for hospital intake, I went cognitively numb. I stammered. I bumbled an uncertain answer: “I don’t know… five, I guess?” I came across as an unreliable information source, regarding my own bodily experience.
What does it mean to be the authority of one’s own body, particularly as a woman conditioned to self-doubt and minimization?
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