Sharon Kaufman PhD, is Professor Emerita, Medical Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Her work explores topics at the intersection of aging, medical knowledge and society’s expectations for health. Her research has examined the changing culture and structure of US medicine; health care delivery at the end-of-life; the relationship of biotechnologies to ethics, governance and medical practice; the shifting terrain of evidence in clinical science; practices of risk assessment; vaccine safety doubt; and mistrust of science. The National Institutes of Health funded her research from 1983 – 2013. She is core faculty in the joint Medical Anthropology Program UCSF/UC Berkeley, and has taught both required and elective courses in the Program for more than 25 years. She lectures frequently at UCSF and UCB and mentors students (medical, nursing, anthropology, sociology, social welfare, public health and other fields), post-doctoral fellows and junior faculty from a variety of disciplines. She is the author of four books and numerous articles.
Presentation Abstract
Ordinary Medicine: Evidence, Experiments and the Tyranny of Standards
In the aging society of the United States, the line between life-giving therapies and too much treatment is hard to see — it is obscured by a perfect storm created by private industry, insurance reimbursement and the promises of evidence and new technologies. The lecture reveals what drives the storm’s “more is better” approach to medicine: a nearly invisible chain of social, economic and bureaucratic forces that has made once-extraordinary treatments seem ordinary and necessary. The lecture probes the following contentious and unresolved questions: What is the relationship between ethics and efficacy? Can the world of medical options imagine finitude? And, what is the role of medicine in an aging society – what should doctors treat?