Plastic bodies

n/

Pitocin

Pitocin is a drug form of oxytocin, ‘the love hormone.’ It is used in birth to regulate labour. It is given via an intravenous line and is only used in hospitals. Pitocin versus ‘natural’ oxytocin has become a key point of tension in debates over the ‘right’ way to manage birthing bodies. Oxytocin works in myriad rhythms and ways and affects people’s feelings and perceptions, while Pitocin doesn’t reach the brain so it only affects the muscles, causing uterine contractions that can be problematically strong. Pitocin can be a helpful tool but there is concern about its over-use. Ideas about ‘hormone cascades’ shape ways of understanding what birth is and how and where it should happen

Advocating for evidence in birth: Proving cause, effecting outcomes, and making the case for ‘curers’

The notion of ‘evidence’ circulates in two realms of current maternity care: biomedical ‘evidence-based’ obstetrics and efforts to reform conventional obstetric practices. I observed that in California’s childbearing culture, ‘evidence’ is a boundary object that allows diverse actors to engage in related conversations despite fundamentally different assumptions about what evidence is or does. Sometimes these actors form productive hybrids and other times they talk past one another. This article uses recent work from the history and philosophy of science to distinguish the biomedical use of evidence, which is based on controlled experiments to prove cause and effect, from reformists’ use of evidence, which foregrounds patient outcomes. Using Stengers’s classification of doctors, charlatans, and curers, I discuss the role of rationality and experience in producing authoritative knowledge. Reformists’ use of evidence, in effect, challenges medical power dynamics on what they perceive to be the terms of medical authority itself; in doing so, it has the potential to fundamentally alter who is the primary beneficiary of medical protocols. The challenge is continuing to use evidence in a way that doesn’t simply ossify a new set of norms, but becomes increasingly capacious, flexible, specific, and patient centered

Discovery of Microsecond Soft Lags in the X-Ray Emission of the Atoll Source 4U1636-536

Exploiting the presence of kilohertz quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) in the timing power spectrum, we find that the soft x-ray emission of the neutron-star X-ray binary and atoll source 4U1636-536 modulated at the QPO frequency lags behind that of the hard x-ray emission. Emission in the 3.8-6.4 keV band is delayed by 25.0 +/- 3.3 microseconds relative to the 9.3-69 keV band. The delay increases in magnitude with increasing energy. Our results are consistent with those of Vaughan et al. (1997), when the sign is corrected (Vaughan et al. 1998), for the atoll source 4U1608-52. The soft lag could be produced by Comptonization of hard photons injected into a cooler electron cloud or by intrinsic spectral softening of the emission during each oscillation cycle.Comment: Accepted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters, 4 page