I just realized that rhymed.
After reading the articles and other case studies on apotemnophilia, I still have a hard time justifying someone to cut off a healthy limb. I am not sure how much a person has thought about re-adjusting to everyday life. Due to culture and society, many things were built for someone with all four limbs (like cars, but you can drive with one arm). Also, how would the person's family react? Would they want to help them re-adjust to life as an amputee, or let them fend for themselves?
Carl Elliot states that people who are unable to have a limb they want removed will do it to themselves, one way or another. In an article called "Amputee Fetishism," a man removes his own penis after enduring some stress in his life. He got it done on the SECOND try! Doctors did not think to even evalute the man psychologically after the first attempt. After reading this case, I believe that there has to be some sort of link between apotemnophilia and genital mutilation.
Lastly, what about the person's employer? For instance, let's say someone who works on a factory line decided to amputate their own arm because they felt like they did not need it. Due to amputating their own arm, their productivity goes down. Does the employer have the right to fire that person?
Maybe we should try to convice the person not to amputate their limb by giving them psychiatric help, and also putting them through a regimen where they are forced to use that limb. From my standpoint, I feel like they are underestimating the hurdles they face in the long run, and they are taking the limb for granted.
You stay classy!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I've been meaning to track this down, but haven't yet--but a friend of mine was a law student in Canada, and she first told me about this tendency/disorder. She told me that in Canada it is illegal to perform this surgery (or was at the time she was in law school ~2003) because it was considered against the "greater good," but in the U.S. surgeons were free to perform this surgery. (obviously from what we've read there may be other barriers to whether surgeons choose whether or not, or their hospitals let them, etc.) Your comment of "2nd try" made me think of this again. If legal, the surgeon's discretion also still weighs on the ability of the individual to follow through with the amputation. What arena ultimately makes this decision--even if it is ruled illegal, a doctor could still perform the surgery if she/he felt that this was in the interest of the health of the patient. So it seems, apart from issues of cost and policy, there is still an issue of individual determination over ones own body. "Do we support the amputee afterward?"sounds very similar to the problem of women being not allowed to have an abortion not receiving support to care for the resulting child. . . I'm not sure exactly where I am going with this comment, just observing how our personal and our political cross back and forth over each other so rapidly...
ReplyDelete