Divided Bodies: Lyme Disease, Contested Illness, and Evidence-Based Medicine

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.

Author: Abigail A. Dumes
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 09/25/2020
Pages: 360
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.04lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.73d
ISBN13: 9781478006664
ISBN10: 1478006668
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social
- Social Science | Disease & Health Issues
- Medical | Infectious Diseases

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