At the same time, my educational background is for all intents and purposes pre-med (though I don’t want to have anything to do with providing human healthcare). And that does its best to instill a deep distrust of alternative and homeopathic medicines as quackery, while at the same time leaving a lot of unanswered questions and a lot of problems that can’t be remedied by modern medicine — such as chronic pain.

What would a medical praxis that operates in a capitalist structure look like that centered working the roots out rather than chopping down the tree?

It would be radically different than the one we have today. It would be much more thorough, more collaborative between patients, nurses, and doctors, much less doubting of the patient’s self-reported history (which would hopefully be more open if mandatory reporting of illegal activities were done away with), and slower all together. There would be more touching, too.

That is something I found while working at the chiropractor – touch is deeply important, especially for people who don’t get touched often. I enjoy giving massages to friends and the SO when they need it, even if they don’t physically need it, because it’s a good excuse for them to get touched outside of a sexual context.

How can we justify not fully funding wheelchairs, walkers, seeing eye dogs, wheelchair accessible vans, accessible buildings etc?

Did you see the series on service animals posted at feministe? here are some links NYT article author’s ScienceBlog, follow up 1, follow up 2, follow-up whatever. I think that also ties in a lot to touch. My dog soothes and comforts me, and cuddles with me whenever I want. Ditto for my SO’s bird, which was doing something similar for him to the bird in the article, before it passed away this past winter. Animals are calming, and readily available sources of physical contact. Something a lot of people don’t get enough off.

Thank you for reminding me to get a massage or something when I get my state refund back.

Thank you for this.

i’m really sitting with this:

“* How many of us think about our relationship with walking with “gratefulness” coloring our thoughts? That is, I may have to do X,Y and Z in order to walk–but *at least I can still walk* and for that I am “grateful”?

Why are we grateful to still be able to walk instead of pissed off that the times that we can’t walk aren’t accommodated in anyway at all in this culture?”