| In this article,through one-and-a-half-years online and onsite fieldworks to People Living With HIV(PLWH),the author endeavors to show how Antiretroviral Drugs(ARVDs),the significant things in PLWH’s lives,flow,why this flow happens,what possible consequences this flow makes,and in such flow,how "Drugs" and "Medical Knowledge" are understood,attached with special meanings.The research suggests that the illness/disease narratives of PLWII quickly shift from the narratives about HIV/AIDS to those about ARVDs after the start of Antiretroviral Treatment(ART).Such narratives show PLWH’s sufferings from the side effects of AVRDs and impel them to seek multiple choices about ARVDs and ARTs.Yet,behind the personal choices stand institutional problems.The Healthcare Reform has achieved the marketization of medical and health services,but its logic of market conflicts with the logic of public goods,which needs to be insisted by public health services.Such conflict also influences the ARTs in China."Money" changes the conventional epidemiological profiles about HIV/AIDS.It stratifies PLWH and their ARTs,and also influences PLWH’s conception of "Illness or not" and their expectation of treatment.All these results then promote the formation of underground market of ARDs.Cheap smuggled drugs keep flowing from the overseas to China,while free drugs provided by Chinese governments flow out again as commodities.Amounts of PLWH gradually step out of the authoritative medical and health system and choose "Self-Medication";plenty of free drugs are misused as post-exposure prophylactie drugs(PEP).These issues possibly threaten individuals’ARTs and even public health."Drugs" and "Medical Knowledge"accompanying drugs are constantly attached with additional meanings and then build their own social lives.However,different from Appadurai’s "The Social Life of Things",Such social life doesn’t necessarily mean changes of qualities of things themselves,but means that things being understood and attached additional values by different knots through their flow,which is the social life surrounding things and being presented by things. |
