The Rise and Rise of the Buffalo Demon in the Clinic
Ethics and the Usurpation of the Generative Body
Medical authority over the generative body is a category error.
Physiology came first.
Medicine came after.
Living bodies already regulate, develop, adapt and repair themselves.
These generative processes existed long before clinical institutions, professional hierarchies or technological intervention.
Yet increasingly, medicine treats this prior physiological intelligence not as the governing system, but as a substrate to be managed.
Medicine does not generate regulation, development or repair.
It can only intervene in processes that already exist.
And the body is not abstract, a random set of cells. It is intelligent, an integrated set of processes ordered into a living organism: autonomic regulation, tissue adaptation, endocrine timing, developmental sequencing, immune modulation and repair. These processes operate continuously, locally and in response to changing conditions. They are not delivered by clinical systems. They precede them.
Across modern clinical practice — and especially in public “science communication” — medicine increasingly positions itself not as conditional support to physiological regulation, but as the governing authority entitled to define, replace and reorganise it.
The underlying assumption is simple:
if I can detect a process, describe it, measure it or model it, I am entitled to control it.
If I can classify it, I have jurisdiction over it.
This is the decisive ethical shift.
Description becomes authorisation.
Observation becomes governance.
Descriptive access to physiology is not governing authority over physiology.
Knowledge of a process does not constitute jurisdiction over that process.
Under the premise of medicine as authority:
Regulation becomes something delivered.
Adaptation becomes something controlled.
Development becomes something redesigned.
Failure becomes a permanent clinical condition.
This is not care of the body.
It is jurisdiction over it.
Authority was transferred from the body to its managers
In the Durga–Mahishasura story, the transgression is not destruction but usurpation.
Mahishasura inserts himself into the domain that generates and sustains life and claims jurisdiction over it.
Durga represents the restoration of authority to the generative field itself.
Many of our current medical practices repeat the same pattern: claiming authority over the processes that generate and sustain life.
Separated from the generative field and transferred to an external power that claims the right to manage it.
The ability of medicine to appreciate, listen to and study the body as an intelligent functioning whole dismished dramatically following the wars of the twenthieth century when doctors comparmentalised the body learning to replace organs with machines. (How Medicine Replaced Physiology with Treatment)
Resentment of generativity
Beneath professional authority and financial incentive sits a quieter motive: resentment of generativity.
Karen Horney’s inversion of Freud’s theory — often described as womb envy — names the same cultural pattern: a drive to place authority over what one cannot generate.
When participation in generative life is impossible, jurisdiction becomes the substitute.
Developmental biology and institutional design
The following examples differ radically in social meaning, but they express the same ethical structure: access to generative life without responsibility for what generation requires.
At its most extreme, this distortion appears wherever access to generative potential is sought without responsibility for generation — including the exploitation of children, whose developmental plasticity represents the least protected form of the generative field.
Cosmetic surgery expresses the same ethical move in its most normalised form: the body is treated as material to be redesigned around an external ideal rather than as a self-organising physiological system.
Gender reassignment medicine represents a particularly sensitive site of this jurisdictional shift because it intervenes in large-scale developmental physiology — endocrine timing, sexual maturation, secondary sex characteristics, bone and connective-tissue remodelling, and fertility potential.
The ethical question is jurisdiction: is medicine supporting developmental regulation, or replacing developmental trajectories in order to meet an externally specified endpoint?
Once developmental trajectories are rewritten rather than supported, the body is no longer treated as a generative authority.
It becomes a design substrate.
Supporting regulation rather than overriding it
Any practice which promotes parasympathetic predominance slows the breath, improves deep sleep and supports the endocrine conditions associated with growth, healing and normal development supports the body’s own regulatory intelligence.
These practices operate from this premise
Ngangkari: traditional Aboriginal therapeudic
SCENAR (self-controlled enegro neuroadaptive regulator) Russian biofeedback electrotherapy
Massage therapy
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)
Buteyko-type breathwork
The body’s regulatory intelligence is treated as primary.
They do not attempt to overwrite physiological processes.
They attempt to re-expose them.
Their interventions preserve sensory afferent feedback, respond to tissue state rather than imposed outputs, and allow autonomic regulation to reorganise locally and contextually.
SCENAR introduces superficial perturbation through the skin and relies on the organism’s capacity to accept, modify or ignore that signal according to local tissue responsiveness.
The device does not instruct the body.
It presents a disturbance.
The organism decides.
Nankari and SCENAR treat physiology as the governing authority.
Modern clinical systems increasingly treat physiology as a managed substrate.
One works inside the body’s jurisdiction.
The other installs itself above it.
What was displaced
Historically, women’s care practices were organised around continuous sensory attention to bodily change — breathing, bleeding, pain, fatigue, recovery, appetite, pregnancy, labour, fever, grief and illness.
This was not informal compassion.
It was distributed physiological surveillance grounded in lived exposure to generative processes.
Modern clinical systems displaced this sensory and relational knowledge with instrument-mediated authority, and in doing so removed women from the governance of generative physiology.
The ethical task is not to reject medicine.
It is to return jurisdiction to physiology itself.