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Token of Loss: Enthography of Cancer Rehabilitation and Restoration of Affected Lives in Kenya

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The Human Enhancement Debate and Disability

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Abstract

Both cancer, which can be life-threatening, and its treatment, which can be life-saving, contribute to bodily degeneration and social and emotional disruption. Rehabilitation through biotechnology can support new lives and assist people in coping with any acquired disability in the process of and after treatment. This entails repair, which utilizes different sorts of objects to improve the body’s natural capabilities in its new state. Cancer patients’ experiences of rehabilitation may vary from the definition of rehabilitation offered by professional and family healthcare givers. Rehabilitation of cancer victims generally involves helping them to obtain maximum physical, social, psychological, and vocational functioning and independence within the limits imposed by the disease and its treatment (DeLisa 2001, p. 770; Romano et al. 2006). The techniques for restoring well-being may even endow the persons using them with extra abilities that they may not have had before diagnosis of the disease, treatment, and rehabilitation processes (cf. President’s Council Report 2003; Hogle 2005). By granting individuals extra qualities in spite of their acquired disabilities, the rehabilitation of body functions and images may go beyond what is considered therapeutic. Nevertheless, despite this potential for ‘enhancement’, prostheses and other artificial rehabilitative technologies act as constant reminders of the initial loss of identity and pre-morbidity functions, as individuals either experience inconvenience using them or through them relive their pre-rehabilitation suffering.

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Authors
  1. Benson A. Mulemi
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany

    Miriam Eilers

  2. Institut Mensch, Ethik und Wissenschaft, Berlin, Germany

    Katrin Grüber

  3. University of Lübeck, Germany

    Christoph Rehmann-Sutter

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© 2014 Benson A. Mulemi

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Mulemi, B.A. (2014). Token of Loss: Enthography of Cancer Rehabilitation and Restoration of Affected Lives in Kenya. In: Eilers, M., Grüber, K., Rehmann-Sutter, C. (eds) The Human Enhancement Debate and Disability. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137405531_6

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