Divided Bodies: Lyme Disease, Contested Illness, and Evidence-Based Medicine (Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography)

Abigail A. Dumes

ISBN 10: 1478006668 / ISBN 13: 9781478006664

Published by Duke University Press Books 2020-09-04, 2020

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 6666-GRD-9781478006664

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Divided Bodies: Lyme Disease, Contested Illness, and Evidence-Based Medicine (Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography)
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books 2020-09-04
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478006668
• ISBN 13: 9781478006664
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

While many doctors claim that Lyme disease—a tick-borne bacterial infection—is easily diagnosed and treated, other doctors and the patients they care for argue that it can persist beyond standard antibiotic treatment in the form of chronic Lyme disease. In Divided Bodies, Abigail A. Dumes offers an ethnographic exploration of the Lyme disease controversy that sheds light on the relationship between contested illness and evidence-based medicine in the United States. Drawing on fieldwork among Lyme patients, doctors, and scientists, Dumes formulates the notion of divided bodies: she argues that contested illnesses are disorders characterized by the division of bodies of thought in which the patient's experience is often in conflict with how it is perceived. Dumes also shows how evidence-based medicine has paradoxically amplified differences in practice and opinion by providing a platform of legitimacy on which interested parties—patients, doctors, scientists, politicians—can make claims to medical truth.

About the Author

Abigail A. Dumes is Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan.