A Philosophical Approach To Medicine and Diabetes
great inspiration. However, the one thing I would like to address and invite others to join in, not only Christians, but any faith you aspire to is that, if we believe in a higher being, who promotes peace and justice within a civil society, then why are humans inflicted with disease and harm? More specifically, the big ‘Why me?’ question. This needs a new paragraph.
‘Why did I get diabetes?’ - Has any one NOT asked this question? Well, here’s an aspiring thought. “A man of suffering well acquainted with infirmity” (Isaiah 53:3). Suffering, makes us more Christian, and more importantly something that theologians, mystics and saints have long pointed out to as one of the best ways to grow closer to God is through the way of suffering and pain. So that with pain and suffering in return come compassion and what I believe an ability to connect more deeply with others who suffer. In conjunction with Christian beliefs, the passion and the death of Jesus, helps the risen Christ intimately understand those who also suffer, everyone in their own way.
I sort of went off the philosophical topic here, mainly due to my a strong personal faith in Christianity, nonetheless, I’m right back into it. ‘Otherness can be like an illness; being a stranger can be analogous to experiencing a form of madness – those same intimations of the unreal and the irrational, when everything that has been familiar is stripped away’. This is taken from Paul Theroux (2000) and as I interpret to believe, is not only adjusting to the new, but, feeling like a stranger, and I see ‘otherness’ as diabetes, diabetes not as an illness but diabetes as a strange intruder. In relation the myth of Philoctetes, which was about him having a wound, but this wound/injury (disease, condition, illness…diabetes), made him noble and strong. I took this as a lesson; that if we remain strong, we also remain superior. Back to Philocteses ‘a power derived from his bearing the pain of his wound’. Another similar interpretation is from Dr. Oliver Sacks who wrote case histories such as ‘The man who mistook his wife for a hat’ and ‘An anthropologist on mars’ (in case interested in looking at). Sacks explains that a ‘disability’ in one area, is like opening the doors a greater access of strength or inspiration in another area of ones life. Or in the eyes of Foucault ‘Bodily illness has become the province of experts…Deviations from the norm (us diabetics, nicely put though) are policed, not by violence, but by scientific management…because it induces pleasure, forms, knowledge and produces discourse’. Foucault here turns the enlightenment’s ideas of critique onto humanistic consequence that all necessities in pursuit by human beings are to the extent that they are truly human. So what do we do as diabetics, do we turn onto alternative medicine? Reject scientific knowledge? I prefer to combine all element into an ideal that suits my own particular line of thought (which can be very [next page]