From https://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/explorations/teachers/view/75/drew-leder
The Distressed Body: Rethinking Illness, Imprisonment, and Healing (2016) by Drew Leder, MD
Dr. Drew Leder graduated from Yale University School of Medicine and holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He recently retired from being a full professor of Western and Eastern Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. He lives in Baltimore with his wife, who is also a philosopher, along with their two daughters and dog.
The Distressed Body
Leder seems to me to be one of those rare combinations of physician and philosopher. A rarity today, but 500 years ago was the norm because medicine was included under the rubric of Natural Philosophy or the philosophy of Nature.
Leder’s mission in this book is to examine the major ways the body can be put into distress—a term he notes is not identical with stress. These are illness and its treatment, organ transplantation, the factory farming of animals, and imprisonment.
Distress comes from the Latin—dis—meaning “apart” and stringere meaning to press together, stress, or bind. When a person is distressed, they are stretched apart of bound and restrained in some manner. He discusses how illness and imprisonment are similar in that the body is in a state of experiential and literal exile respectively. Chronic pain is a common distressor and has a paradoxical nature. It is a sensation that requires identification (what kind is it and where is it located?) and interpretation (what does it mean?). Leder identifies the paradoxical aspects of how the interpretation of pain changes its experience and meaning:
- it has certainty and yet there are uncertain aspects about it;
- it changes our sense of time
- it is both static and dynamic
- the ambiguity of its actual location—in the body or the brain—depends on its type;
- it is both owned like an organ as well as foreign to us;
- pain affects one’s sense of personal space;
- pain both disempowers a person, but can also empower them;
- pain is not only destructive, but can be creative as well;
- pain is the gift nobody wants.
The sense of touch and its practice in a medical setting and a healing setting is one of objective technique vs. empathic connection. Leder’s thoughts come from an extended recovery period from a very serious and painful ankle injury he sustained in combination with his experiences with the conventional medical and complementary, alternative, integrative medical practices. Standing in one world as a medical doctor while being able to explore the other alternative realm makes for an engaging perspective. Likewise, he is realistically discerning about our use of drugs and our ceaseless hunt for the “magic bullet” pill that will cure what ails us. Leder is not against pharmacology, but rather he sees each drug as a potential gift to the body that helps rally its own healing resources.
As one might imagine, Leder spends some time looking at the current state of the medical system. He notes that medicine is based on materialism (physicalism) and that it has enjoyed immense success from it. He notes that people often criticize medicine for being “too materialistic” meaning it lacks the holistic view and close personal contact often found in CAIM modalities. The problem Leder sees is that the medical system has become too monetarily materialistic as it is now increasingly driven by productivity and profit. Time is indeed money in this world. Leder distinguishes between the scientific materialism and the monetary materialism by taking a Buddhist perspective that money is ultimately an abstraction, but it is one that has almost gone so far as to turn each patient and their body into abstractions as well which places it on the road to dehumanization; assembly-line medicine for the maximum efficiency. He advocates instead for making medicine more materialistic by embedding it in a holistic framework thereby losing the dehumanization by tempering the technological supremacy.
Leder then gives his views on bioethics, the horrors of factory farming, and the prison system. He, as you may have noted above in the list of his prior works, spent a great deal of time working with convicts in the prison system and listening to their experiences of being physically incarcerated. He sees a great deal of similarity between the mass animal processing industry and American prisons.
Ultimately, Leder is arguing for a closer corporeal bond with Nature and other human beings. The world is distressing in seemingly endless ways and our bodies live this reality on a daily basis. Leder is seeking ways to progressively change the world by using embodiment as both his lantern and his lancet.
Other Books by Dr. Leder
The Soul Knows No Bars: Inmates Reflect on Life, Death, and Hope (2000).
The Absent Body (1990).
The Body in Medical Practice and Thought (1995).
Spiritual Passages: Embracing Life’s Sacred Journey (1997).
Games for the Soul: 40 Playful Ways to Find Fun and Fulfillment in a Stressful World (1998).
Paul D. Shane, Ph.D., LMT
Director, Academic Content
References
Leder, D. (2016). The Distressed Body: Rethinking Illness, Imprisonment, and Healing. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.