<
https://www.salon.com/2023/05/14/im-immunocompromised-ive-been-cautious-about-covid-thanks-to-everyone-else-it-doesnt-matter/>
"I walk my dog on a path that makes a wide loop around the YMCA near my house.
From the periphery of the parking lot, I can see people rushing from their cars
to the building to spend an hour on the treadmill or in the pool. I'm
immunocompromised from treatment for multiple sclerosis, an incurable,
progressive disease of the central nervous system.
I've resorted to walking around the building for the past three years because
I'm at risk for getting very sick or dying from COVID-19. It's safer for me to
get my exercise outside, separated from the maskless people exercising inside.
For the people inside the gym, squeezing a workout into a busy day is a symbol
of morality in a society that equates good health with good morals. People who
are well and non-disabled are conditioned to believe that eating well, not
smoking, and getting 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity per week not only
ensures that they'll have good health, but that they
deserve it. Sick and
disabled people like me know that this is not true, however. This belief is
reinforced by the medical models of health and disability and for-profit
healthcare in the US.
The doctrine of the medical model is so ingrained in our culture that it shapes
the way Americans understand the concept of health. The medical model focuses
on preventing and treating individual conditions in individual bodies, rather
than correcting systemic factors that affect people at the community level.
It's a reductive approach that ignores the social determinants and forms of
discrimination that shape health outcomes. It's concerned with correcting
deviations from a normal defined by the absence of disease and disability.
This normal is not neutral. According to the medical model and the moral model
it evolved from, people who are sick or disabled are abnormal and "bad",
lacking both good health and, presumably, good morals.
The medical model is the blueprint for a US healthcare system that profits from
the fear of this abnormal. Our for-profit system offers band-aid solutions for
individual body parts rather than care for the complex, interdependent
relationship between the sick and disabled body and mind. American healthcare
is the least effective for those with the greatest needs, and that's not just
an unfortunate side effect of the system– it
is the system."
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: May 18, 2023
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-83181180
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
