Aboriginal perceptions of renal failure | |
Living on medicine. A cultural study of end-stage renal disease among Aboriginal people. Jeannie Devitt, Anthony McMasters. Alice Springs: IAD Press 1998 (xiv+192pp.). ISBN: 1 86465 002 8. |
"I used to
be as healthy as a white person", says an Aboriginal haemodialysis patient candidly. As one of the many central Australian Aboriginal people swept along on the tide of end-stage renal disease, there is a sense of bewilderment and fatalism. Living on medicine is a sociological study looking at perceptions of patients and their families of the healthcare system as it impacts on their lives. The reader is presented with some frank accounts of people grappling with the final stages of renal failure in an alien environment, facing the prospect of literally living on medicine for the remainder of their lives. Although the interviews resulted from Aboriginal experiences with renal failure, these concepts can equally well be translated to the larger issues about health and illness from an Aboriginal perspective. Living on medicine includes extracts from many hours of interviews that took place between 1994 and 1995. The authors are Jeannie Devitt, an anthropologist who has lived and worked with Aboriginal people in central Australia intermittently since 1981, and Anthony McMasters, a local Aboriginal Health Worker who was employed at the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress at the time of the study and who is currently working in the Alice Springs haemodialysis unit. Richard E Lucas
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