Featuring Medical and Cultural Anthropologist Dr. Scott Stonington
Dr. Scott Stonington is a medical and cultural anthropologist, and an internist. He studies decision-making at the end of life in Thailand and spent many years accompanying Thai patients at the end of life and in particular trying to understand pain, suffering, and the role of pain medications from these patient’s points of view. Dr. Stonington also studies medical epistemology in the U.S., specifically looking at how health practitioners decide what constitutes true and/or useful knowledge and how this affects patients.
Please read his Perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine about the concept of the debt of life, The Debt of Life – Thai Lessons on a Process-Oriented Ethical Logic, and his article in JAMA entitled Whose Autonomy?, a meditation on how he thinks about decision-making, pain, and pain control. In addition, he wrote further about how his work in Thailand has changed his thought process on pain in The (f)utility of pain, published in the Lancet.
Also, a quick note that the day we recorded this show I was still recovering from an upper respiratory infection and you can hear me coughing which is distracting so I apologize about that.
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This interview has been lightly edited for clarity (and Audrey’s terrible voice this week!). Photo courtesy of Scott Stonington.