Medical Authority and Governance of the Body in Contemporary Iran

An understanding of modern life and living is directly associated with the social realities of health and illness which cannot be explicitly separated from the role of professional medicine, medical power and social knowledge. Scholars have come to the conclusion that some of the issues such as governance in health, financing of health care, human resource imbalances, and access and quality of health services have a considerable impact on the quality of health services. Furthermore, changes of other areas such as economics have had an impact on it too. The problem which dominates regulating bodies/governing bodies is how to comprehend the historical evolution of the discourse about the body, to acknowledge how our perspectives on the body are the products of social construction, and to retain an appreciation for the phenomenological nature of the lived body. The present study has investigated several factors that have helped catalyze change and explain Iran's current progressive policies. The traditional medical knowledge has been strengthened by a recent significant progress in the field of biomedical science by launching new high-tech biomedical research projects.