Aronowitz studied linguistics at Berkeley before receiving his M.D. from Yale. He did his internal medicine residency at Pennsylvania Hospital and was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Penn. Before starting his present position, Aronowitz was an attending physician at Cooper Hospital and taught at the RWJ medical school. At Penn, Aronowitz was the founding director of the Health and Societies Program and co-director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholars Program. He is the author of Making Sense of Illness: Science, Society, and Disease (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Unnatural History: Breast Cancer and American Society (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Risky Medicine: Our Quest to Cure Fear & Uncertainty (Chicago University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Three Shots at Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine's Simple Solutions (Hopkins, 2010), and has published widely on the history of medicine.
Entangled bodies: the challenges of living with so many medical interventions
Powerful medical interventions have rapidly and widely diffused. For example, the CDC estimates that the average American yearly fills prescriptions for 12 different medicines and has 9 lifetime surgeries. In both historical and policy analysis, the major questions have understandably been ones about the efficacy, safety, cost, and value of interventions. Less often considered are the challenges posed by highly intervened-in bodies and populations for translating aggregate knowledge to the care of individuals, for distinguishing effects of disease from intervention, for increased dependency on access to medicine and supporting infrastructure, and other challenges. I will give an overview of what I consider a complexity crisis in patient and clinician decision making and explore some of its historical drivers. I will suggest that despite the promise of evidence-based medicine and rule-based practice to guide decisions, clinicians and consumers will remain reliant on therapeutic rationalism & reasoning.