The many faces of medical treatment imperatives: Biopower and the cultural authority of medicine in late‐life treatment decisions in the United States

Abstract

Despite changes in specific features of the US health‐care system and policy environment in the past 50 years, professional dominance of medicine remains consistent. Extant social science research has considered how the cultural authority of medicine manifests and persists, sometimes emphasizing institutional structural influences and other times focusing on how individuals’ agentic behaviour shapes their decisions and strategies regarding the consumption of health‐care. We build on and extend these literatures using qualitative in‐depth interview data to explore a typology of ways palliative care patients and their caregivers experience medical treatment imperatives across a range of social contexts. Rather than viewing or validating these lived experiences through a medical lens, we foreground the accounts of patients and caregivers as they describe their experiences of where, when, and how they perceive pressure to engage in medical treatment in late life. We adopt a Foucauldian lens to examine how this biopower is both an internal and external experience in our modern biomedicalized society. Our work reveals how treatment imperatives are generated within clinical medical encounters, but also coproduced through multiple and overlapping forces that compel individuals to pursue medical solutions to bodily problems.

Unsettling the treatment imperative? Chemotherapy decision‐making in the wake of genomic techniques

“…breast cancer, chemotherapy, gene expression profiling, genomic medicine, treatment decision-making, treatment imperative as well as an ethical responsibility (2008, p. 344). Spencer et al (2022) show how this treatment imperative is generated beyond clinical encounters. Attending to experiences of late-life palliative care, they demonstrate its co-production through diverse actors and circumstances including care-providers and family members, as well as treatment schedules, biographical histories and test results.…”

“…Spencer et al. ( 2022 ) show how this treatment imperative is generated beyond clinical encounters. Attending to experiences of late‐life palliative care, they demonstrate its co‐production through diverse actors and circumstances including care‐providers and family members, as well as treatment schedules, biographical histories and test results.…”