![Image: Christ Healing the Sick by John Friedrich Overback [link]
Blogger’s Note: You don’t need to agree with the discourse or how it’s presented because that’s not the point, these are the thoughts of a young lady who is living with three autoimmune disorders and they’re worth sharing incredible.
How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity [The Cluster Mag]
Because of the rapid spread of autoimmune disease in industrialized nations, Nakazawa states, “Scientists the world over have dubbed it ‘the Western disease.’” The medical community remains unsure as to its origins, but often cites genetic factors. Others, unsatisfied with this weak causal explanation for these “Western” afflictions, have been exploring the environmental triggers of autoimmunity. One’s immune response is partially genetic. If you are not predisposed to autoimmunity, you are not likely to develop an autoimmune disease. Yet to not take into account environmental factors seems like a sanitization of a bizarre phenomenon, a reliance on the hermetic discourse of a medical field governed by specific protocols. I don’t mean to blame anyone specifically for the illnesses they have endured, but humans have likely participated in the creation of this situation. Our bodies have absorbed environmental degradation and the consequent chemical toxicity load.
There are currently no known cures for most autoimmune diseases. They are discussed as chronic conditions that must be in a lifelong process of mitigation through biomedical means. My doctors would plead with me, as I shuffled into their offices with my walker, to take Humira. Biologics are a new class of drugs, barely a decade old, used to treat a few autoimmune conditions. Humira, which carries a black box warning, is an exact clone of a human antibody. It’s a human protein cultivated in the bodies of mice. These biologics function as immune-suppressants, essentially shutting down the body’s immune system to prevent it from attacking itself.
But, left without its defenses, the body becomes vulnerable to fatal cancers, other autoimmune diseases, and opportunistic infections; Humira’s medicine-as-technology counteracted my body’s self-destructive but “natural” behavior. Forget the dualistic mode of thought, in which nothing was wrong with me, but something was wrong with my body. The idea is that I was deficient, and the only way to become the optimal version of myself was to embrace a drug that would make me do no more than function, all for $3,000 a month.
My doctors’ assurance was that I would get well. I would be able to get a job with benefits that would allow me to pay for insurance. Biomedical treatment operates on a capitalist understanding of time. Rather than embracing the regenerative powers of the body, the idea is to get back to work as quickly as possible. It is the body’s radical autonomy that resists commodification. To spite our optimal productivity, it gets sick. Sickness can be masked and treated but the body responds nonetheless. It reacts. It may take longer to recover than is convenient to your boss. We do not have time to get you better. We have time to make you functional.
“You are too young to live like this!”became my well-intentioned doctors’ refrain.“What a shame! We can get you back to work! You should be out living your life!”And so, they perpetuated the supposed narrative of health and death: illness is something which comes late in life, right before the end. They acted as if I was experiencing an inconvenience. As if I wasn’t living my life anyway. They didn’t understand that this experience had stripped and shed a light on me, making it simply impossible to carry on as before. There was no return to “normal.”
They often asked me about what I did before I became sick. As if that was me, and this a brief interlude of discomfort.In fact, most discussions in doctors’ offices are about pain or discomfort. These are important issues. Proust wrote, “Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.”
As my life came to be ruled by the sensation of pain, it became impossible to think about anything except the sensation of pain. But pain is only the partial story of the body, a symptom of an underlying problem, whether an injury or a systemic issue. Pain is the body calling out for your attention. I wanted to be healthy again, not simply living without pain. I wanted a medical practice that addresses the true health of the body.
I resisted starting Humira for this very reason. My doctor explained that the way to eliminate the pain and inflammation was to clamp down my overactive immune system. Doing this would prevent it from attacking my joints and my intestines, leaving me pain-free. But it didn’t take care of the underlying problem: my immune system is confused. Eliminating my immune system sounded like a bad—an incomplete—idea.
Most of my friends and family urged me to take what was offered. Even the people that I’d identified or had self-identified as radical or left-leaning were suspiciously unsuspicious of the biomedical industrial complex: that every other industrial complex demanded rigorous scrutiny, but in matters of health and the body, medicine was unmarked and depoliticized.
Here I was in the hospital, having my body completely compartmentalized— treated not as a living organism but as an alienated collection of symptoms. What I realized through these visits, and my increased aversion to biomedical intervention (even while it was keeping me alive) was a resistance to a cyborgian present. I was in a futuristic nightmare, watching my body change and having no control over it; getting post-industrial noise MRIs; having a blood transfusion and feeling two pints of someone else’s cold blood course through my veins; getting a colonoscopy, where I was knocked out and a fiberoptic camera was stuck up my ass and through my intestines. I asked for a copy of the video, a request they did not take seriously, nor find humorous.
I am not a neo-Luddite. I am wholly indebted to modern science and technology for keeping me alive and in little pain. I believe in the specificity of cases. Sometimes biomedical treatment is inevitable and sometimes it is not, but I find expressions of the body purity problematic. Our bodies are not discrete entities. They constantly interface with organisms and substances in our environment. Body modification and augmentation is an age-old human practice. We have always been cyborgs.
Intellectually, I embrace the idea of being a cyborg, but in the midst of my health crisis I became opposed to this new identification. Faced with feeling less and less human, I clung to a particular idea of humanity denied through current medical practices. My symptoms also made me feel human, in a particularly disagreeable way.
h/t: Wetware Ontologies](http://25.media.tumblr.com/8311a780109f2c9e03fe8957274a4d77/tumblr_mhs3ivnjCq1qzs6yjo1_1280.gif)
Image: Christ Healing the Sick by John Friedrich Overback [link]
Blogger’s Note: You don’t need to agree with the discourse or how it’s presented because that’s not the point, these are the thoughts of a young lady who is living with three autoimmune disorders and they’re worth sharing incredible.
How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity [The Cluster Mag]
Because of the rapid spread of autoimmune disease in industrialized nations, Nakazawa states, “Scientists the world over have dubbed it ‘the Western disease.’” The medical community remains unsure as to its origins, but often cites genetic factors. Others, unsatisfied with this weak causal explanation for these “Western” afflictions, have been exploring the environmental triggers of autoimmunity. One’s immune response is partially genetic. If you are not predisposed to autoimmunity, you are not likely to develop an autoimmune disease. Yet to not take into account environmental factors seems like a sanitization of a bizarre phenomenon, a reliance on the hermetic discourse of a medical field governed by specific protocols. I don’t mean to blame anyone specifically for the illnesses they have endured, but humans have likely participated in the creation of this situation. Our bodies have absorbed environmental degradation and the consequent chemical toxicity load.
There are currently no known cures for most autoimmune diseases. They are discussed as chronic conditions that must be in a lifelong process of mitigation through biomedical means. My doctors would plead with me, as I shuffled into their offices with my walker, to take Humira. Biologics are a new class of drugs, barely a decade old, used to treat a few autoimmune conditions. Humira, which carries a black box warning, is an exact clone of a human antibody. It’s a human protein cultivated in the bodies of mice. These biologics function as immune-suppressants, essentially shutting down the body’s immune system to prevent it from attacking itself.
But, left without its defenses, the body becomes vulnerable to fatal cancers, other autoimmune diseases, and opportunistic infections; Humira’s medicine-as-technology counteracted my body’s self-destructive but “natural” behavior. Forget the dualistic mode of thought, in which nothing was wrong with me, but something was wrong with my body. The idea is that I was deficient, and the only way to become the optimal version of myself was to embrace a drug that would make me do no more than function, all for $3,000 a month.
My doctors’ assurance was that I would get well. I would be able to get a job with benefits that would allow me to pay for insurance. Biomedical treatment operates on a capitalist understanding of time. Rather than embracing the regenerative powers of the body, the idea is to get back to work as quickly as possible. It is the body’s radical autonomy that resists commodification. To spite our optimal productivity, it gets sick. Sickness can be masked and treated but the body responds nonetheless. It reacts. It may take longer to recover than is convenient to your boss. We do not have time to get you better. We have time to make you functional.
“You are too young to live like this!”became my well-intentioned doctors’ refrain.“What a shame! We can get you back to work! You should be out living your life!”And so, they perpetuated the supposed narrative of health and death: illness is something which comes late in life, right before the end. They acted as if I was experiencing an inconvenience. As if I wasn’t living my life anyway. They didn’t understand that this experience had stripped and shed a light on me, making it simply impossible to carry on as before. There was no return to “normal.”
They often asked me about what I did before I became sick. As if that was me, and this a brief interlude of discomfort.In fact, most discussions in doctors’ offices are about pain or discomfort. These are important issues. Proust wrote, “Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.”
As my life came to be ruled by the sensation of pain, it became impossible to think about anything except the sensation of pain. But pain is only the partial story of the body, a symptom of an underlying problem, whether an injury or a systemic issue. Pain is the body calling out for your attention. I wanted to be healthy again, not simply living without pain. I wanted a medical practice that addresses the true health of the body.
I resisted starting Humira for this very reason. My doctor explained that the way to eliminate the pain and inflammation was to clamp down my overactive immune system. Doing this would prevent it from attacking my joints and my intestines, leaving me pain-free. But it didn’t take care of the underlying problem: my immune system is confused. Eliminating my immune system sounded like a bad—an incomplete—idea.
Most of my friends and family urged me to take what was offered. Even the people that I’d identified or had self-identified as radical or left-leaning were suspiciously unsuspicious of the biomedical industrial complex: that every other industrial complex demanded rigorous scrutiny, but in matters of health and the body, medicine was unmarked and depoliticized.
Here I was in the hospital, having my body completely compartmentalized— treated not as a living organism but as an alienated collection of symptoms. What I realized through these visits, and my increased aversion to biomedical intervention (even while it was keeping me alive) was a resistance to a cyborgian present. I was in a futuristic nightmare, watching my body change and having no control over it; getting post-industrial noise MRIs; having a blood transfusion and feeling two pints of someone else’s cold blood course through my veins; getting a colonoscopy, where I was knocked out and a fiberoptic camera was stuck up my ass and through my intestines. I asked for a copy of the video, a request they did not take seriously, nor find humorous.
I am not a neo-Luddite. I am wholly indebted to modern science and technology for keeping me alive and in little pain. I believe in the specificity of cases. Sometimes biomedical treatment is inevitable and sometimes it is not, but I find expressions of the body purity problematic. Our bodies are not discrete entities. They constantly interface with organisms and substances in our environment. Body modification and augmentation is an age-old human practice. We have always been cyborgs.
Intellectually, I embrace the idea of being a cyborg, but in the midst of my health crisis I became opposed to this new identification. Faced with feeling less and less human, I clung to a particular idea of humanity denied through current medical practices. My symptoms also made me feel human, in a particularly disagreeable way.
h/t: Wetware Ontologies
Jay Keasling, director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) program, founder of the new Richmond lab, and pioneer of synthetic biology research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley, responding to concerns about the large energy and biotechnology corporations that are “funding this research and licensing the patented new technologies it produces.”
Life is hard.
Belief that people are better off in a free market, even if some are rich and some are poor, is a casualty of the Great Recession. Faith in capitalism has fallen since 2007, especially in Europe and Muslim majority countries.
A very pretty chart but it says very little.
Terry Eagleton responding to the question, “Do you think at this point in history “Marxism”, “communism”, “socialism”, “leftism” are basically interchangeable? Would you insist on sharp distinctions?”
Barker, Alexander and Niven, Alex. “An Interview with Terry Eagleton.” The Oxonian Review. 4 June 2012. Web. 4 June 2012. [source] h/t: ayjay)
I’m very fond of the final three sentences.
![thenoobyorker:
The album cover to Lil B’s, Berkeley, California based rapper, new album titled I’m Gay (I’m Happy).
The first pane states Slavery, the second panes states Mental Slavery while the third pane majestically proclaims Mental Freedom. As many of you are aware, the album deals with the psychological conditions of the middle pane while evoking inescapable past struggles as he yearns for true freedom, a freedom encompassed by the phrase mental freedom. Therefore one is unsurprised to learn that Lil B consistently evokes slavery and other somber moments in black history throughout the album as he critiques the many forms of slavery that impede the progress today towards a complete mental freedom.
And the rap game/ It’s the slave trade/ No time for meditation/ Turning into robots/ The Devil is money/ It’s not even human/ The people die for a piece of paper/ It’s so stupid
-from the song “Unchain Me” [link to song]
Mental slavery/ Niggas be hanging off of trees in the woods, like the hood/ It’s more than Martin Luther King, fighting for a dream/ Watch me go against everything you believe/ They desrespect you tryna spark a dream/ Everybody knows it’s easy to fail but it’s harder to think…
-from “Trapped in a Prison” [link to song]
Lil B should consider reading Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society.
Edited for length purposes but this is Lil B.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_loctqvVuqE1qzs6yjo1_1280.jpg)
The album cover to Lil B’s, Berkeley, California based rapper, new album titled I’m Gay (I’m Happy).
The first pane states Slavery, the second panes states Mental Slavery while the third pane majestically proclaims Mental Freedom. As many of you are aware, the album deals with the psychological conditions of the middle pane while evoking inescapable past struggles as he yearns for true freedom, a freedom encompassed by the phrase mental freedom. Therefore one is unsurprised to learn that Lil B consistently evokes slavery and other somber moments in black history throughout the album as he critiques the many forms of slavery that impede the progress today towards a complete mental freedom.
And the rap game/ It’s the slave trade/ No time for meditation/ Turning into robots/ The Devil is money/ It’s not even human/ The people die for a piece of paper/ It’s so stupid
-from the song “Unchain Me” [link to song]
Mental slavery/ Niggas be hanging off of trees in the woods, like the hood/ It’s more than Martin Luther King, fighting for a dream/ Watch me go against everything you believe/ They desrespect you tryna spark a dream/ Everybody knows it’s easy to fail but it’s harder to think…
-from “Trapped in a Prison” [link to song]
Lil B should consider reading Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society.
Edited for length purposes but this is Lil B.
The crucial lesson of the Depression that many contemporary politicians and economists have either forgotten, structurally unable to actualize, or realize that crisis benefits them and their corporate cronies greatly. There are exceptions, like in Latin America, but only because they went through the hell of neoliberalism. (via nicoie)
