Chronic Failures: Kidneys, Regimes of Care, and the Mexican State [Hardcover]

Chronic Failures: Kidneys, Regimes of Care and the Mexican Stateis about Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) and the relentless search for renal care lived out in the context of poverty, inequality and uneven welfare arrangements. Based on ethnographic research conducted in the state of Jalisco, this book documents the routes uninsured Mexican patients take in order to access resource intensive biotechnical treatments, that is, different modes of dialysis and organ transplantation. It argues that these routes are normalized, bureaucratically, socially and epidemiologically, and turned into a locus for exploitation and profit.  Without a coherent logic of healthcare access, negotiating regimes of renal care has catastrophic consequences for those with the least resources to expend in that effort. In carrying both the costs and the burden of care, the practices of patients without entitlement offer a critical vantage point on the interplay between the state, markets in healthcare and the sick body.
 Chronic Failures: Kidneys, Regimes of Care and the Mexican Stateis about Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) and the relentless search for care within a context of poverty, inequality and uneven welfare arrangements. Documenting the routes taken to access care, the practices of patients without entitlement offer critical perspectives on state-market-healthcare relations.CIARA KIERANS is a reader in social anthropology in the Department of Public Health and Policy at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. She is the coauthor ofSocial and Cultural Perspectives on Health, Technology and Medicine: Old Concepts, New Problems.