Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: Chronic pain challenges the traditional construction of pain and illness, which dictates that an illness or pain is -normal‖ if its duration is brief and its effect is acute.The diagnosis of illness, conducted under the auspices of the scientific authority of biomedicine, consists of the examination and evaluation of the place in which illness resides, the physical body.As such, this examination constitutes a process that ultimately adjudicates the validity of an illness and, as such, the validity of its sufferer.Biomedicine relies on a Foucaultian model for the construction of illness, a disembodied framework that is applied to the examination of illness.Under this guise, medical and scientific institutions treat disease as a separate entity from the body and the body as a distinct entity from the person occupying it, thereby establishing a distinction between the -sign‖ and the -symptom.‖As indicated by the extant sociological inquiry on this topic, it is this paradigm of disease that is responsible for the delegitimation of any illness for which there are no empirical pathologies or signs.Such illnesses have been identified as -contested‖ by social scientists and include Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, and chronic pain.Given the higher frequency of the experience of chronic pain within the total population, this condition is of particular interest.Previous sociological research has examined the social construction of pain from the micro level perspective of the patient as well as that of the physician.Alternatively, sociological inquiry into the biomedical framework within which the construct of pain residesthat of empirically-based medical research, as constituted in peer-reviewed scientific journalshas been minimal.This study examines those publications, utilizing the methodology of content and textual analysis to determine how the condition of chronic pain is constructed within and by the field of biomedicine.As asserted by Eccleston et al., the inability to identify the source of pain challenges the very foundations of Western medicine as being -scientific, powerful, technical, and efficient‖ (p.706).With this research and analysis, I ultimately seek to improve our understanding of the ways in which biomedical researchers validate the existence of a condition that is so nebulous and seemingly unexplainable.I argue that this biomedical enigma threatens the very foundation upon which biomedicine is constructed and as a result, the foundation, validation, and legitimation of biopower; the strategic maneuver of delegitimation is subsequently used to dismantle this potential threat.Thus, it is critical to examine further the role and importance of power in the construction of chronic pain.v
Author: Elizabeth Sweeney
Institution: University of Cincinnati
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2223300847