Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
interest is how the screening, and the high risk information indicating a
possible abnormality, seems to interrupt the 'normal' pregnancy and create
diffi culties for the women to return to this 'normal state' even long after
confi rmation of a normal foetus.
In Chapter 7, Gunilla Tegern discusses some of the impacts of advances
in medical imaging technology, more specifi cally the magnetic resonance
imaging scan. This technology can provide increasingly detailed information
about intracranial aneurysms, information that can save lives, but also
unwarranted information about so-called 'cold aneurysms' in people who
see themselves as healthy. In this chapter, the author analyses people's
experiences of a ruptured aneurysm and of unexpectedly being diagnosed
with a 'cold aneurysm' presented in illness narratives on an Internet site. The
focus of the analysis is here on the meaning of the intracranial aneurysm,
and on the social representation of this condition that people draw on when
trying to describe and understand their own experiences: the representation
of a 'ticking bomb'. An important element in these narratives is how people
try to come to terms with what it means to be living with the risk of a
potentially life-threatening condition, without any symptoms, and how the
self in this process comes to the forefront as a more or less permanent
thematic object of attention.
A different type of technology is discussed in Chapter 8. During the 1990s
the prescription of anti-depressive pharmaceutics, such as SSRIs, increased
rapidly. Fredrik Svenaeus raises the question of how we can understand
this SSRI revolution. How should we listen to Prozac, as the title of Peter
Kramer's much-read topic of 1994 urges us to do? An attempt is made to
show how the philosophical tradition of phenomenology can pave the way
for a better understanding of the issues involved in both the development
of this technology and the pro-contra debates surrounding it. Three types
of phenomena, characteristic of depression and anxiety disorders - painful
feelings, problems with engagement in the world, and altered embodiment
- are scrutinized in order to explore the realms of normal and abnormal
being-in-the-world, mainly with the aid of the philosophy of Martin
Heidegger. In addition to this, the concept of normality itself is subjected to
a phenomenological analysis.
Through the different examples presented in this topic we hope to shed
more light on the impact of medical technologies, as they are used and
communicated in clinical practice. More specifi cally, we would argue, the
variety of the pieces of research that are discussed can help us to a more
profound understanding of how the life world enters into the use of medical
technologies, and how medical technologies are understood and their use
intervenes into the life worlds of people. Finally, we hope this topic will
contribute to the emergent discussion about medical technologies and the
ways they are understood and experienced by people within and outside the
medical professions.
