Growing up I couldn’t see. Not literally but growing up my vision was terrible. I can remember never being able to see the board in school, squinting my eyes to see what friends were where during recess, and not being able to see a baseball while I was batting. I also can remember my mom saying that I only wanted glasses for attention. While that sounds monstrous (I promise, my mom is one of the sweetest women I know), she was inadvertently a product of negative biomedicine. With biomedicine focusing on bringing physiological and biological principles to a clinic someone like my mom, a public health official, struggles with biomedicine. Flash forward a couple of years later I underwent corrective lens surgery, LASIK surgery. The surgery was a success and my vision is now rated 20/15 meaning that if an object is 20 feet away I can see it with the same acuity (how clear an image is) as someone who is 15 feet away from the same image. Basically the surgery corrected my vision so well that I have better than “perfect” vision. For that I can thank biomedicine. With biomedicine taking on physiological and biological principles it allows health professionals to expand out beyond what was once possible, in terms of medicine and health. If it wasn’t for biomedicine I’d be wearing glasses or contacts right now, which there’s nothing wrong with but I will say I’m happy to be without.

Biomedicine also allowed for newer diseases to come out and gave us a way to analyze and categorize these newer diseases. Therefor people are getting treatment for what was once a made-up disease. Think about something along the lines of depression, or obesity. While there’s been lots of advancements, one negative aspect of biomedicine is that it speaks on a model of a human and not always an actual human. In practice taking drug one could help with disease one, but sometimes taking drug one helps disease one but creates disease two. This is where the argument of biomedicine vs. public health comes in. Public health looks to create preventative techniques whereas biomedicine is all about getting to the solution, and by any means. Most of these means are usually in the form of pharmaceuticals which some fear could create larger problems down the line.

Swinging back to my story, I also can remember my mom preaching to me to not use screens before bed, to not sit an inch away from my monitor while playing video games, and to give my eyes periodic breaks throughout the day. My mom being a public health official was looking big picture. She was trying to use preventative measures rather than defaulting right to a fix which would be glasses. In terms of positives I feel forever in debt towards my eye doctor. She gave me the gift of vision. Like I said lasik surgery wouldn’t be possible without biomedicine, without taking a different approach towards healing and that alone is a huge positive. Fortunately for me, my family and I could cover the cost of the operation since insurance was unable to help. With biomedicine expanding and evolving the cost of entry is also. This is a negative aspect of biomedicine. It’s troubling to think about barriers that already exist with health and when you factor in the dominant system of biomedicine you can see how this could get even more out of hand.