Dr. Garcia’s Pastoral Clinic is a fascinating ethnography surrounding the lives of those who are recovering addicts across different but interconnected fields. “From the clinic to the courthouse,” Dr. Garcia argues that the singularness of of release and rehabilitation is actually linked to broader society as she looks specifically at a rehab center in New Mexico. Her arguments also emphasize how the scientific and public health community’s views of addiction as a chronic illness has both benefits and contradictions to medical treatment for those who are addicts (15). For example, the relapse is considered inevitable which can send the wrong messages to those in rehab or even the medical providers who assist the patients.
I found her conversations regarding Espanola Valley and Los Alamos comparison fascinating as she digs beyond the technological innovations that Los Alamos had accrued, and instead, she opined that attitudes about reform to medical community in New Mexico and the United States as a whole particularly the switch to manage care models initiated the changes in technology and other reforms. The result of not meeting the standards of manage care models meant being labeled “unstable” and “not credible.” As a result, stories’ such as Christina’s would occur where those with suffered with addictions were forced to either leave home away from the resources or stay in some of the conditions that may have bolstered their struggles with addiction.
As for areas that I will take note for my paper, I sometimes found discovering what the central argument of Dr. Garcia’s book difficult. Although its common for scholars to have multiple arguments, I often did not know which argument was the star or main premise. However, Pastoral Clinic cogently paints a picture of the negative/contradictory impacts of defining addiction as a chronic disease.