Things that making living fully hard & being manipulated easy
When I was in college if the conversation landed on the topic of ‘health care’ (aka sick care) in America you could reliably expect me to deliver a 15 minute rant that traversed corruption within drug companies, corruption within health insurance sellers (hehe, they want us to call them PROVIDERS ;) sounds better, right?) - two of the reasons Americans pay the most in the WORLD while also topping the charts of disease rates.
Eventually my rant would meander over to the pharmaceutically funded curricula that well intentioned pre-med students studied and then to their practices that left them drowning in admin to get approval from health insurance companies to treat their patients to ensure they’d be able to put food on their table while covering the cost of malpractice insurance, and paying the staff they had to hire to do the admin that they couldn’t do themselves.
All of this, to realize once they are in the room with the person they went to school to be able to help that their training was so focused on treating a sick body’s symptoms that their prescription pad is often their most useful tool. There hadn’t been time to learn powerful ways to support a body’s wellness and innate ability to heal - not much $$$ for drug and insurance dealers in that.
I know the vast majority of doctors have no intention of being an extension of a drug company and some of them aren’t (and from the bottom of my heart I salute these strong willed, caring folks who break the mold and truly practice the art of medicine with their patients whether as M.D.s or D.O.s or as folks who’ve circumvented this process altogether to receive training in a healing art that hasn’t been captured by big pharma’s profit margins) but lots and lots and lots of them are, they just might not be on the payroll.
By the time I got to this part of the rant I was AMPED.
I’ve been incredibly passionate about this constellation of topics since I was in high school when I first studied alternative cancer treatments and cancer research. At the time my 15 year old self was SHOCKED to discover that there were effective methods for treating cancer that were being actively censored and discredited by the companies that stood to lose money if people had access to them. As you might surmise my highschool days predate hardcore censorship by everyone’s favorite search engine. It was then that I lost faith in the public health establishment.
While all of these factors together (plus the way our government is set up around them) make health care in America one big, hot mess, there’s something that’s closer to home that has also facilitated this trainwreck.
This conversation’s final stop comes back to what each one of us can control. To me, to you, to the individual patient and our resistance to taking responsibility for our own wellness.
When the individual treats his or her health like it is someone else’s responsibility (we do this with so many things, like our happiness and emotional wellbeing, too) we end up creating a giant, expensive game of hot potato and opening the door for someone to sell us solutions at a premium because the cost of tuning in, making changes, moving our bodies and eating well - taking ownership of our health - combined with our inability to trust ourselves is just too great.
My health isn’t my doctor’s responsibility or my neighbors responsibility or the head of the CDC’s responsibility - it’s mine. I’m grateful to have trained folks to consult with to make sure I’m on the right track but it's up to me to pay attention, make changes when things are off and to be discerning about who I choose to take advice from.
Getting this wrong is in part why doctors have to spend so much on malpractice insurance - responsibility for someone else's health is expensive and it isn’t something anyone else wants to shoulder since they have no control over my behavior when I leave their office.
Now that we’ve come this far I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that taking responsibility for one’s health and life is hard, taking responsibility for meeting one’s needs is hard, taking responsibility for one’s actions, emotions, mistakes and judgments is HARD and humbling. I struggle to be take responsible for some combination of these things daily but, a full, vibrant, fulfilling, creative, empowered, free, expansive, one of a freekin kind life is on the otherside of taking responsbility and I’m not interested in less than that.