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Paper Short Abstract:

Based on two years of ethnographic interviews with chronically ill patients and participant observation with practitioners of complementary medicine this paper examines what “sensitivity” can show about the relationship between the individual and the environment, and how this impacts health.

Paper Abstract:

After World War Two, the US shifted to systems of governance, systems of medical research and healthcare, and systems for social management that relied on the values of stability and control. Psychology and medicine began to work together in the middle of the 20th century to engineer health within the individual by tweaking an individual biological system to match a range of “normal” performance (Jackson, 2013). Contemporary health cultures, including conventional medicine, psychology, complementary and alternative medicine, as well as wellness culture, sites of inquiry in this research, have all inherited this focus on the individual, rather than the environment, as the site for intervention.

Based on two years of ethnographic interviews with patients of chronic illness and participant observation with practitioners of complementary medicine in California, US, this paper examines what “sensitivity” can provide as source of information about the relationship between the individual and the environment, and how this impacts health. It explores how sensitivity gets devalued in US culture, medicine included. Centering narratives of chronic illness and health practice, this paper explores how mainstream medicine participate in encouraging healthy and abled people to think they can avoid vulnerability through individual effort and ‘fitness.’ In reality, as disability justice advocates argue, and as Covid-19 among other epidemics of chronic illness illustrate, chronic illness is a question of timeline, not fit versus unfit.

Jackson, Mark. The Age of Stress: Science and the Search for Stability. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2013.