Contested legitimacy of regenerative vs. established biomedicine in Brazil: On the circulation and co-regulation of immunostimulant therapies for autoimmunity
African, American and Oceania Studies
Public Health, Healthcare Research, Social and Occupational Medicine
Rheumatology
Sociological Theory
History of Science
Final Report Abstract
Strengthening one’s immune system belongs to the current recommendations made by specialists to prevent multiple illnesses, and several products and habits have been encouraged to keep one’s body healthy. Nevertheless, when it comes to treating people with immunopathologies, such as arthritis, lupus, diabetes etc., there is great scepticism within biomedicine regarding immunostimulation. Despite their unpredictability, global biomedical authorities consider such immunopathologies as chronic and normally inform patients that they have to learn to live with it. While immunosuppression is the backbone of established paradigm in areas like rheumatology, immunostimulation-based therapies tend to be marginalized when they are proposed to become authorized. Yet, immunostimulation lies at the heart of regenerative medicine (RM) as the set of medico-scientific projects to coax the body to repair itself. Given that, is it possible for immunostimulation to emerge not only as preventive policy but also as a legitimate therapeutic model to tackle pathological autoimmunity? Through this project, I sought to understand anthropologically the negotiation dynamics of medico-legal regimes under the impact of contested immunostimulants as a promissory biomedical future and, particularly, as RM to treat immunopathologies. A central question that has guided my work is: How do the development, production, circulation and co-regulation of biotechnological innovations based on immunostimulation as a therapeutic model, whose principle is opposed to that of globally established immunosuppressants, affect and are affected by law, science and economy? To anchor this guiding question in a particular context, I have been investigating how scientific innovation, established biomedicine and informal health care co-exist and interface in contemporary Brazil, and how their relations are mediated by legal institutions and other actors. Following that, I comparatively situate controversies about the use and regulation of immunostimulants (especially those recognized as ‘unspecific’) to treat autoimmune diseases in Brazil, mainly from the perspective of immunostimulant users, as parts of the debate on what counts as proof in science and medicine, and for whom. Methodologically, I followed contested immunotherapies throughout Brazil through participant observation, open-ended interviews, digital methods, historical and archive research. The findings of this project reinforce my argument that the controversies surrounding contested immunotherapies reveal how the renewal of biomedicine also unfolds transfiguratively by means of informal pharmaceutical economies, other cultures of legality, and respective moralities. Additionally, when considered from an international perspective, controversies around unspecific immunostimulant therapies, which I comparatively addressed, reveal how research into the production, circulation and co-regulation of immunostimulant therapies for the treatment of immunopathologies in Brazil can provide critical insights into the emergence of RM as a transnational process.
Publications
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Following ‘Fosfo’. Medicine Anthropology Theory, 7(1).
Vilar, Márcio
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Transfiguration. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and the Body, 104-119. Routledge.
Vilar, Márcio
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Feeling Out of the Box: Challenging Chronicity among Sick Physicians through Disruptive Medical Innovation in Brazil. Curare – Journal of Medical Anthropology 46(1). Special issue ‘Ambivalences of Healing Encounters’, (eds.) Cornelius Schubert and Ehler Voss
Márcio Vilar
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Tackling the Unknown: Medical Semiotics of Inflammation and their Legal-Epistemological Boundaries in Brazil. Medical Anthropology, 43(2), 130-145.
Vilar, Márcio
