Autoimmunity and phenomenology: The personal IS political.

Autoimmune disorders are on the rise in the Western world with increasing aetiologies that indicate a growing sensitivity, especially among women to environmental stressors such as viruses, bacteria, occupation, chemicals and internal mediators such as hormonal changes (Cooper and Stroehla, 2003; Molina and Schoenfeld, 2005). This paper argues that discourses and perspectives of medical science originating in post-industrial C19th changes to treating larger populations in expanding cities are long due an overhaul and are currently going through a positive crisis indicating aspects of an autoimmune disorder at play.  The movement to give patients a voice, recognition that technology does not have all of the answers, personalised medicine and environmental medicine are all symptomatic of a fragmentation of different ways of thinking about and knowing health from individual perspectives. The paper argues that the repression of these experiences and the methodologies and treatments they involve presents a suicidal impulse similar to Derrida’s (2003) reading of the 9/11 terrorist attack as automumity. It argues such repression inhibits a positive flourishing of future healthcare that must of necessity involve re-cognition of patient autonomy rooted in an experiential partnership, especially in the face of technologies that can offer diagnosis but often not yet treatment. The experiential process broadly describes the method of inquiry known as phenomenology originating in the philosophical work of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau Ponty. This paper locates feminist correspondences with phenomenology in the work of de Beauvoir and Irigaray that offer a re-reading of postmodernist reflexive practices aligned with the work of Michel Foucault. It explores and offers some context for contemporary issues and challenges in autoimmunity as an experiential illness and considers how this and phenomenology offer positive transformative potential for patient experience and self-authoring. Ultimately the paper concludes and demonstrates arguments for critical study of the Humanities in Medicine and Healthcare. Keywords: autoimmunity, patient experience, phenomenology, health paradigms References: Cooper, Glinda S. and Stroehla, B. (2003) The epidemiology of autoimmune diseases. Autoimmunity Reviews 2(3): 119-125. Derrida, Jacques (2003). ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides—A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’ in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida , Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 85–136. Molina, Vered and Shoenfeld, Yehuda (2005) Infection, vaccines and other environmental triggers of autoimmunity, Autoimmunity 38 (3). Doi : 10.1080/08916930500050277