Abstract
Back-pain patients in the US may undergo multiple surgeries in search of relief, enduring a sometimes-stunning repetition of procedures that can actually intensify and extend their pain. Such outcomes have now been rendered as an illness with its own diagnostic label: “failed back surgery syndrome.” Producing both pathology and profit, this surgical seriality reflects the ambivalence of pain (and its treatments) in the US and maps the mutual mediation of pharmaceutical and surgical therapeutic modes in contemporary biomedicine. For both patients and doctors, the surgicalization of back pain confirms that pain is real and serious, and also conforms to valued forms of (productive, nonnarcotized) life. It thus reflects and reinscribes situated social ideals of embodied and moral personhood in the contemporary US. [failed back surgery syndrome, surgical seriality, pain, medicalization, pharmaceuticalization, surgicalization, moral personhood, United States].
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 58-71 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | American Ethnologist |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 1 2020 |
Funding
. This research was supported in part by VA HSR&D IIR Award 05–201. It represents the views of the author, not VA positions or policy. I am grateful to Elizabeth Roberts and Lawrence Cohen for organizing a long‐ago AAA panel, “Surgical Futures,” which sparked my initial venturing into FBSS, and for lively continuing conversation. Gala True was a treasured collaborator in the early phases of this project. An earlier manuscript version benefited from the generous, productive attention of the Medicine and Its Objects Workshop at the University of Chicago, particularly discussion with Judith Farquhar and Zhiying Ma, and from my extraordinary Medical Humanities and Bioethics colleagues and students via the Montgomery Lecture series at Northwestern, particularly my writers‐in‐arms, Katie Watson and Debjani Mukherjee. Harris Solomon and Rebecca Seligman offered incisive, crucial feedback on later revisions, while insightful and enormously patient guidance from editors Nico Besnier, Stacy Leigh Pigg, and four anonymous reviewers exemplified the very best of what the review process can be. Acknowledgments
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Anthropology