ABSTRACT

This collection is dedicated to the diagnostic moment and its unrivaled influence on encompassment and exclusion in health care. Diagnosis is seen as both an expression and a vehicle of biomedical hegemony, yet it is also a necessary and speculative tool for the identification of and response to suffering in any healing system. Social scientific studies of medicalization and the production of medical knowledge have revealed tremendous controversy within, and factitiousness at the outer parameters of, diagnosable conditions. Yet the ethnographically rich and theoretically complex history of such studies has not yet congealed into a coherent structural critique of the process and broader implications of diagnosis. This volume meets that challenge, directing attention to three distinctive realms of diagnostic conflict: in the role of diagnosis to grant access to care, in processes of medicalization and resistance, and in the transforming and transformative position of diagnosis for 21st-century global health. Smith-Morris’s framework repositions diagnosis as central to critical global health inquiry. The collected authors question specific diagnoses (e.g., Lyme disease, Parkinson's, andropause, psychosis) as well as the structural and epistemological factors behind a disease’s naming and experience.

chapter |24 pages

Introduction

Diagnosis as the Threshold to 21st Century Health

part |52 pages

Diagnostic Access

chapter |20 pages

Testing Pregnant Women for HIV

Contestations in the Global Effort to Reduce the Spread of AIDS

chapter |30 pages

Resisting Tuberculosis or TB Resistance

Enacting Diagnosis in Georgian Labs and Prisons

part |89 pages

Medicalization and Resistance to Diagnosis

chapter |28 pages

Promotion of Andropause in Brazil

A Case of Male Medicalization

chapter |20 pages

Making Sense of Unmeasurable Suffering

The Recontextualization of Debut Stories to a Diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

chapter |20 pages

Credibility and the Inexplicable

Parkinson's Disease and Assumed Diagnosis in Contemporary Australia

part |84 pages

Diagnosis in a Global Community

chapter |22 pages

Supervirus

The Framing of a Doomsday Diagnosis

chapter |24 pages

Diagnosing Psychosis

Scientific Uncertainty, Locally and Globally

chapter |32 pages

The Lyme Wars

The Effects of Biocommunicability, Gender, and Epistemic Politics on Health Activation and Lyme Science