Abstract:
The practice of medicine is political. Decisions about selection and treatment of patients have power effects, inevitably reinforcing or undermining existing hierarchies of class, gender, f nationality and race. Resources are scarce and de facto resource allocation occurs all the time, but the mechanisms which achieve it are generally hidden under a mask of media and medical rhetoric which persists in assuring us that it is the health of homogenized ‘Humanity’ which medicine serves. Even the ultimate in high-tech surgical luxury, organ transplantation, is promoted and defended in these terms: we are constantly bombarded with media schmaltz praising ‘modest’ hero doctors and sentimentalized anonymous donors for so wonderfully serving Humanity by giving a ‘fellow human being’ the ‘gift of life’. Enormous pressure bears on all of us to refrain from having the ‘bad taste’ to point out that nobody’s life can be saved forever and that devoting resources to prolonging one transplant patient’s ‘precious human life’ entails not using them in programmes that might have prolonged hundreds of other equally ‘human’ lives – apparently not such precious ones. I want to ask, who benefits from our complicity in the pretence that these treatments that do so little for so few do so much for all?
Details / PDF:
The full-text PDF of this article can be downloaded from Informit. You can purchase the article, or access Informit for free via a public library account, such as the State Library of Victoria.