From Drugs for Life to Living for Drugs: viewing hospice care from an institutional/pharmaceutical perspective

• In Event: Well Years, Good Years, Quality Years – Calibrations and Aggregations of Daily Living: Daily Living

Abstract

This paper aims to provide observations about the end of life’s journey from a perspective that echoes the recent STS scholarship concerning drugs and the human condition drugs create. Departing from existing literature that treats aging care and hospice/end-of-life care separately, this paper insists that observing the life paths of an aging individual is a necessity. It also argues for a preliminary yet serious investigation of aging people's social and bodily conditions as well as their dynamic relationship with pharmaceuticals.

Among the numerous sites that emerge in an aging society, this study focuses on hospice wards, out-patient clinics, and health promotion centers. They were chosen in order to exemplify the social and cultural characteristics of how aging people cope with the inevitable routine of taking drugs. This paper hopes to reveal not only the ways aging people are provoked into taking drugs in order to maintain their way of life, but also the transfiguration of these people as they start losing control over their bodies and social lives and become subject to institutional care/death. Therefore, this paper is a scholarly snapshot of our lives on pharmaceuticals or, more exactly, pharmaceuticals lived out within an aging society.

Author

• Wen-Hua Kuo, National Yang-Ming University