Abstract

My life as I had known it would become what the physician and historian Chris Feudtner termed, transmuted . He argued, diabetes as a disease concept had transmuted , changing over time by society’s interference in its natural progression. And so began my transmutation, as I reflect upon my life, the life of a young man as a diabetic whose natural progression was altered less by the disease and more by society’s attempts to define and control it.

Highlights

  • Monday morning the young physician had verbalized his worry that I may be suffering from diabetes

  • In his paper A Disease In Motion: Diabetes History and the New Paradigm of Transmuted Disease Feudtner argued that diabetes as a disease concept was transmuted by “medical interventions, diverting the natural history of diseases [such as diabetes] onto other, more chronic courses” [1]

  • Patients’ experiences with diabetes were diverted “away from the path defined by the natural history and towards what is more accurately called a transmuted course” [1]

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Summary

Audience Perspectives

I wrote this essay with the aim to highlight how society chooses to define a disease and influence the identity of those who are living with it. I said that I tried but I kept waking up in the middle of the night to relieve the pent-up liquids that I had been drinking He had succumbed to my stubborn intentions, finding himself a victim of my circular entrapment. I was a young man, even though the physician had declared to my parents in that hospital room that I had become at that moment, a diabetic. Feudtner’s historical account of diabetes utilized a dynamic approach , whence he called diabetes a “disease in motion,” transformed by cycles of new medical interventions and therapeutic paradigms He argued, diabetes as a disease concept had transmuted, changing over time by society’s interferences in its natural progression. Began my transmutation, as I reflect upon my life, the life of a young man as a diabetic whose natural progression was altered less by the disease and more by society’s attempts to define and control it

DIABETES AS IDENTITY
HISTORIOGRAPHICAL TRANSFORMATIONS
CONFESSIONS OF A DIABETIC

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