Medical Schismogenics: Compliance and "Culture" in Caribbean Biomedicine

As biomedicine turns increasingly toward chronic diseases, compliance or adherence with pharmaceutical regimens has become a major focus. This article explores the specters created by the diagnostics of non-compliance, focusing on asthma in the eastern Caribbean country of Barbados. I argue that the rubric of compliance in biomedicine today medicalizes "culture" as a gendered irrational use of medications; and such a focus has created a counterdiscourse among families and medical practitioners that posits a biomedicine obsessed with "compliance." I suggest that these reciprocal reactions comprise a medical schismogenics that exceed the diagnostics of noncompliance, whether biomedical or anthropological.