During my junior year of high school, my older sister woke up screaming in pain one day. We had no idea what was wrong, she told us it was her leg. My mom and I thought it was a charlie horse because she had worked out the night before. But we were extremely wrong. My mom took her to the doctor the following day. Our doctor thought maybe it was a torn muscle, so my sister started physical therapy. She continued physical therapy for a month, It did not help at all and the pain got worse. During that last week, my sister did not have any symptoms of a blood clot. It was her last day of physical therapy that she started to become extremely swollen and her leg was warm to the touch. Our physician became concerned, immediately scheduled an MRI as he suspected it could potentially be a blood clot. It came to the day she was supposed to have her MRI, the hospital called and canceled. My sister was in so much pain that my parents decided to just take her to the emergency room. She ended up with a blood clot from her groin to her knee on her left leg. The cause: hormonal birth control. Something our OBGYN never checked was my sister’s blood. After tests, my sister found out she has a blood clotting disorder, which means she should’ve never been put on birth control in the first place. As said in the lecture, “Biomedicine is great at healing acute medical problems with one specific cause.” But, my sister’s health issue did not have one specific cause. One weakness of biomedicine in this situation was looking at just the issue, instead of looking at the whole person. Our physician just figured it was a muscle, instead of looking at other possibilities. The idea of my sister having a blood clot went over every doctors head because she was in her 20’s and healthy. That’s an issue I think biomedicine has, an easy way out. We tend to try and find one reasoning for something and treat only that issue. While most of the time there are multiple reasons why we have a health issue. In my sister’s case, birth control was not safe for her to take because she had an unknown blood clotting disorder. She had two risks that no one ever addressed. Which actually effects me because I can no longer take birth control after they discovered this. But, biomedicine did help save my sister life. They were able to detect and get rid of the blood clot because of biomedicine. Overall, my sister is okay and healthy now. But, from this experience, my family has taken caution with prescription drugs. It’s an issue I have taken to heart as someone wanting to go into medicine. There are some extremely positive and negative effects of biomedicine that we have to figure out how to balance.