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medpundit |
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Tuesday, March 30, 2004What is new is the involvement of doctors in fulfilling the desire for self-transformation. In recent decades, doctors have become much more comfortable giving physical treatments to remedy psychological and social problems. They give synthetic growth hormone to short boys to remedy the stigma of being short; perform rhinoplasty to remedy the stigma of having a 'Jewish nose'; and give Propecia to middle-aged men to remedy the stigma of having a bald head. Now that the enhancement of psychological well-being has come to be regarded by some as a proper goal of medicine, the range of potentially treatable medical conditions has expanded enormously. Is the success of these technologies a problem? In many cases, no. Some of these drugs and procedures alleviate the darkest kinds of human misery. For every person using an anti-depressant to become 'better than well', there is another using the same drug for a life-threatening depression. And if sex reassignment surgery can effectively relieve a person's suffering, then the question of whether or not it is treating a proper illness seems rather beside the point. Yet it is hard to remain completely untroubled by all this medical self-transformation. One worry is about what the philosopher Margaret Olivia Little calls 'cultural complicity'. As hard as we may find it to condemn individuals who use drugs and surgery to transform themselves in accordance with dominant aesthetic standards, on a social level these procedures simply compound the problems they are meant to fix. The more East Asians who get plastic surgery to make their eyes look more European, for instance, the more entrenched the social norm that says East Asian eyes are something to be ashamed of. The same goes for light skin, large breasts, Gentile noses or a sparkling personality. posted by Sydney on 3/30/2004 08:18:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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