Please sponsor my 5k swim coming up in April and help support Marie Curie Cancer Care, an organisation which provides home nursing care to people with terminal illnesses.

The recently reported collusion of medical professionals with torturers at CIA black sites is sick and outrageous, particularly when it goes as far as this:

in subjecting prisoners to “suffocation by water,” “it was alleged that health personnel actively monitored a detainee’s oxygen saturation using what, from the description of the detainee of a device placed over the finger, appeared to be a pulse oxymeter.”

One thing it is not, however, is surprising—not, at least, when considered in the context of the history of US medical experiments on humans. The most infamous case is probably the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (for more on the history of experimentation on black Americans, read Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid).

Experimenting on one group of people to find cures or treatments for another relies on a hierarchy of bodies; stigmatized bodies are sacrificed for the good of valued bodies or even for some abstract notion of knowledge. It is only a short jump from that to sacrificing stigmatized bodies for security or “intelligence”.

I like the TV on for background noise while writing; for whatever reason, I find it less distracting than the radio. The other day, however, a snippet of a Cialis commercial caught my attention: women should not take or handles Cialis due to the risk of a specific birth defect. Shouldn’t that be women who are pregnant or who plan to become so? Granted, this isn’t much of a loss given that Cialis is a treatment for erectile dysfunction, but the generalization does reflect a broader attitude that can impact a woman’s health and freedom.

Treating women as pre-pregnant limits their access to needed medications. It means encouraging women to give up activities they enjoy simply because these activities might harm a potential fetus that may never exist. It means reducing the value of women to what their uteruses (and maybe their breasts) can produce. This pernicious attitude needs to be called out wherever it appears.

When I was in eighth grade, my father who never took sick days spent several days in pain on the couch. Eventually, he was moved to the hospital. They had missed, at first, what was wrong with him: deep vein thrombosis. He recovered, but they never tested him for the genetic disorder known as anti-thrombin deficiency. Had they done so and found the deficiency, the HMO would have been required to cover medication for the rest of his life.

At the time, they had pay incentives for doctors who cut costs.

It wasn’t until I had moved to San Francisco in August of 2001 that my family found out about the possibility of a genetic disorder. Unfortunately, we learned about it when the emergency room doctor who couldn’t save my father told my mother that my siblings and I should be tested. The second time my dad developed blood clots, they went to his heart. His heart kept pumping, but it had nothing to pump.

This story is one of the main reasons I support universal health care: it illustrates how damaging the profit motive can be in healthcare. It also shows that, until such time as the profit motive is eliminated, we must educate each other about these types of diseases so that we can demand proper testing and treatment. February 28 is Rare Disease Day, coordinated in the US by the National Organization for Rare Disorders, so tell me: what rare disease do you know about?

ETA: A reader suggested this resource for people with undiagnosed diseases.

February 14-21 is National Condom Week, and not to be left out of the festivities, Bristol Palin has declared that abstinence education is unrealistic. Really, the timing is just a happy coincidence, but her story is one example of why sex education needs to include explanations of how and why to use condoms and other forms of protection. We also need to work to reduce the stigma surrounding condoms. One way to do that is to talk about them; another is to have fun with them. Use them to decorate windows, blow them up and throw them around in a crowd. If you’ve bounced something around like a balloon, you can’t very well be embarrassed by it, can you?

Until all the stigma is gone, however, we need to protest policies like those of CVS that limit access. Even if we ever succeeded in removing any sense of shame from purchasing condoms, the necessity of purchase would be a limit for some. Protection of all kinds needs to be available to everyone, regardless of income, preferably as part of universal healthcare.

Amy King’s Men by the Lips of Women moves from a specific case to men and women in general before it finally brings both situations together with an echo of a title. In the process, the poem evokes a sort of possessing love, both harmful and desired, both certain and uncertain. It also implies the presence of duende, perhaps even the man’s identity with it in the lines

He sounds in the brain’s eagled hollows
of a soft guitar from a Spanish café
among the mountain peaks in nightshade.

More importantly, the poem covers the tension between how a single individual may construct or learn to view the world.

The title implies women speaking men into existence, but at the start, it is the man, the specific unnamed man, who has the book and the ink. This hints at an opposition of the oral and written tradition connected to gender. It is, however, not so simple. He sees, however, from the book; he, the specific man sees what someone else has written for him. Which gender wrote the book? “The mother of everyone calls him” suggests the power of women, or at least of a symbol of women, possibly a goddess. The speaker, probably female, has viscerally altered his body into a thing that frightens goat yet seems, when expressed in her words, aesthetically pleasing: “His toxins become a cherry blossom wine.”

These seem to place woman, or women, in an authorial role. Then, however, we come to these lines:

I am that love you light yourself with
and my gender is powerless in this.

She, the individual woman, is being used by the man so that he can see (or construct) himself. Her gender as a whole and as an identity can do nothing to change this.

In the last line, King resolves this tension while resisting the temptation to create a false certainty: “man reading men by the lips of women.” The men he reads includes himself, yet his power to construct identity depends upon the women, though how much power what they say has remains unclear, a highly realistic uncertainty.