This past winter, my 12 year old sister was diagnosed with anemia. When she was diagnosed, she immediately had to have a blood transfusion due to the low cell amount in her actual blood. This led to her being admitted to the hospital for a whole day while she had gotten the blood transfusion. Within a week, her blood cells had gotten to normal levels and in order to stabilize the blood cell count, there were several solutions. Amongst these solutions was birth control, which is admittedly the easiest and most common way of solving this. This is because while on birth control, women don’t menstruate as much, which can reduce the chances of getting anemia. Because of this recommendation and the ease of this method, my mom decided to allow the doctor to prescribe my sister to birth control. This medical event highlights a few positives and negatives about Western Biomedicine. For starters, it highlights how well the Doctors can treat their patients in an emergency situation, it also shows the life saving measures that doctors are adapted to handle in a precise manner. As for the negatives, it shows how biomedicine teaches doctors to prescribe pharmaceuticals to a patient to control chronic conditions.

This event shows the adaptation of how physicians react in emergency situations. Technology and effective lab testing had played in the role of getting a quick diagnosis and overview of the medical situation and how to treat the patient effectively and accurately to avoid more problems.

This event can be considered a life saving experience because if she were to not have gotten a blood transfusion any sooner, she would have had organ failures. The blood cells carry oxygen to the lungs, so as stated, it could have been a very bad situation. The fact that the doctors were able to diagnose the issue and then immediately come up with a solution is outstanding.

This event also showed a negative response from Biomedical practices by prescribing pharmaceutical drugs to control a chronic condition. The birth control prescription helps reduce the amount of menstruation that occurs which apparently lowers the chance of being diagnosed with anemia, but although you’re avoiding anemia, you can still stumble across other conditions or side effects from the medication prescribed to a patient. Also, using specifically birth control for that long of a period, assuming she’ll stay on birth control as she goes into her adolescent years can harm fertility problems. I believe that there could be be better research conducted to improve maintenance of several conditions, including anemia.

Biomedicine has definitely evolved and is still evolving, but it’s important to step back and review its flaws, for the sake of patients of western medical professionals. It is important to understand that there are other options and to continue to do research as a patient to ensure that you are being put in the best situation, medically. Many people don’t realize the negatives of biomedicine and we don’t always focus on the positives of biomedicine either, but the most important thing to focus on is its progression.