Lecure 5 Flashcards
Social Power:
the capacity to influence another or a social group enacted through wealth, violence and intimidation, status
advantages, authority, responsibility, influence, creative control etc
• Contested diagnoses
- where both patient and health worker
seek to influence the other
What is bio power?
• ‘Biopower’ is increasingly the model of social power used by
critical researchers in health studies.
• It is a theory of how social power operates in urbanised
societies, not through the use of blatant physical force but
persuasively and almost unnoticed through taken for
granted knowledge and practices (discourses) such as ‘good
health’ – ideals promoted by authoritative sources and
against which people measure and monitor their lives to try
to create a ‘self’ in accordance with these desirable goals
• One of the issues of this type of power is that we can’t
escape it – it pulls us deeper and deeper into its influence.
Health becomes somewhat like a new religion for us.
Connection to required reading
Taken together, ParticipACTION and Fitbit make visible an orientation of health awareness: Optimization. Each of ParticipACTION and Fitbit promotes an altar of health where health is defined as a socially and physically fitter (optimized) self, always just out of reach and attainable in the future. Each of ParticipACTION and Fitbit relies on and reinforces the piety that time is a resource to be managed. This piety is anxiogenic insofar as they perpetuate a cruel optimism that the future holds a better self. Furthermore, they ignore the possibility of sickness and limited abilities, and the inevitability of ageing, while providing an orientation of Optimization that is, by definition, unachievable. If more movement is always better, and acting now ensures better health later, there is no achievement too high, and arguably, no end to achieve.
• The rhetoric ignores ill health, the difficulties of exercise, the variety
of abilities we have for it
FROM SLIDES
Gaudet (2023) explores the rhetoric (persuasive power) of 2
approaches to health improvement – a Canadian NGO health
promotion campaign promoting physical movement and a
private corporation that sells fitness self monitoring devices
for monitoring daily steps
• Engaging with entangled definitions of health that address power (such as biopower or rhetoric) and complexity (intersectionality) reward us with more realistic information about people’s health needs and behaviours in ‘real’ life.
• The ways in which we ‘ do’ health and the sorts of health knowledges that our governments and other key institutions in our societies create are not neutral – they are aspects of biopower
A biomedical world view
Read ups
• Suggests there are 3 dominant epistemological views on
departures from health – biomedical, phenomenological,
and social
• Argues there is a clash between phenomenological models
of ‘unhealth’ (the patient’s experience) and biomedical
models of ‘unhealth’ (the biomedical worker’s
understandings of it)
• Authors argue a widespread dissatisfaction with treatment
outcomes in biomedicine & interactions with health care
workers, and this explains the rise in Complementary
Therapies (CAM) which focus on individuals and self
Salamonsen & Ahlzén (2018) note the focus on…
cartesian dualistic thinking in Biomedicine can make
palliative and chronic care difficult to deliver ie the
shift from cure to care and management – similar to
the problems of the restitution narrative in lecture 2.
metaphor of the journey and of pilgrimage
suffering and healin
suffering and healing – it is
mostly in the widest epistemological perspective of
biomedicine (that of PCC) that healing is routinely
included, suffering can be the outcome of the
application of the narrow epistemological viewpoint.
Some dictionary definitions of entanglement:
“a complicated or compromising relationship or situation”,
“a situation or relationship that you are involved in and that is difficult to escape from”
To say health is ‘entangled’, recognises..
it is not a simple status easily ascertained by a laboratory result or quick physical examination
Waka
canoe, vehicle, conveyance, spirit medium,
Iwi
TRIBE
extended kinship group, tribe, nation, people, nationality, race - often refers to a large group of people descended from a common ancestor and associated with a distinct territory.
