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‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie!’ Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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@btaf45
"Thanks to hundreds of years of treating the male body as the default in medicine, we simply do not know enough about how disease manifests in the female body."
This is big one. I'm a woman who's been misdiagnosed for the simplest of things. Twice I've blown my ACL, and both times it took 6-8 months to diagnose ... even tho the first time I pulled the ACL right off the bone. My rotator cuff took 20 yrs. All because women aren't supposed to hurt themselves at work.
I'm sick of the BS
Yeah, people often talk about scammers and grifters and how "insert-ableist-slurs" and "gullible" people who believe them are, but none of those "I'd ever fall for that!!1" types ever look at why people were so easily convinced, what large chunks of care are missing in society that people have no choice but to be drawn to the "alternatives" no matter how bogus or even dangerous - at some point the system has let you down so dramatically that even if it did finally offer a solution, you'd have no reason to trust it.
The result of which is instead of trying to better the system so that fewer people get treated poorly or not at all, they just shift the blame to those who fell victim to the scan, and can pat themselves on the back for being "better" without actually doing fuck all but ridicule vulnerable people.
People like that are just as much a part of the problem - the grifters give them someone to ridicule and feel superior to, they pander to the ego of the "unconvinced" as much as, if not more, than to the ego of the people they're trying to scam, giving that (ego boost) up even if it is to do the right thing (but in favour of those these individuals see as lesser) just doesn't make sense to them.
It's such an exhausting problem that so many people hold society back from meeting everyone's needs, because society fails to meet everyone's needs and thereby creates people who hold society back from meeting everyone's needs, because...
It feels like being locked in a room full of people flinging shit at each other because they are mad that people won't stop flinging shit at them and everytime you try to gently suggest they all just stop flinging shit they just start flinging it at you until you shut up.
Crab mentality is by design, and the only way out is to look at who's fucking bucket it is.
So
while this is true on the surface, to find the core of the problem you have to look at who actually benefit from this state of affairs and never forget that it's those few who hold society back, not the many people they pit against each other to stop us from turning on them.
How does one find those few people? And how can they be worked against? I honestly don't know and I don't know how to find out. Do I ask ChatGPT???
Shit, maybe I should ask ChatGPT...
There is definitely a small set of powerful, rich, and influential people who "benefit", but I don't think it's a pyramid of nefarious overlords so much as it is just a large web of people acting on their own interests.
The same could be said for people with crab mentality. They are acting on their impulses, values, and opinions, born from likely unfortunate circumstances, when they drag their immediate others down. They aren't thinking about holding society back at large.
Plus, quite often things are the way they are because of historical inertia. It's why historians place make such a big deal about continuity. For example, many laws we have can be traced back to some series of awful events that happened to a set of people. But those awful events were probably caused by yet another set of awful circumstances.
If you're looking for some group of people to blame for all of your woes, you might just become a fascist.
Those are all just crabs in the bucket. Some of the more aggressively single-minded ones are nearer to the top of the pile than others.
right, because looking to free yourself from the grip of fascism = fascism.
But hey, thanks for the live demonstration of how a crab in a bucket might actively keep themselves and others in that bucket!
You "enlightened" centrists never cease to amaze me with the bullshit you pull out.
You're entirely reading what you want to read out of my words, and then promptly applying some vague label as if you're somehow the most enlightened yourself. As if, probabilistically, we both aren't in very similar circumstances being here this very moment in the system that you seem to so despite.
@okmko @DessertStorms
#EatTheRich
I don't actually think you're asking in good faith with the bot joke, but if you really care you don't need to look that hard, they are literally all around you (the person who pays your wages after they've pocketed most of the value of your labour, the person who collects your rent by commodifying and profiteering off of a basic human right to shelter, the government that allows them to continue to do so and worse, and who also privatise your national services for personal gain and much much more), you just need to open your eyes to how they exploit you and the rest of society.
It's called capitalism, look it up.
And no, abolishing capitalism isn't fascism, it's quite literally the opposite (since capitalism in decay is fascism as we can see being demonstrated around us in real time).
The other person saying that targeting an individual group of people turns you in to a fascist is full of shit in this instance (and is acting exactly like a "crab" who refuses to acknowledge the "bucket" even exists, but instead tries their best to keep down those who do because they threaten the status quo this person is obviously comfortable enough in) - capitalism isn't a marginalised or oppressed group it is an active marginalisation and oppressing machine, and standing up to oppressors does not equal oppression, it's literally liberation.
It certainly feels like a runaway process
Not just medicine, also things like crash safety. Female crash test dummies just entered use in the past couple of years, and still aren't required.
Awful to hear about stuff like this, it continues to blow my mind how privileged men are without even realizing it.
That privilege had its price.
Our medical knowledge didn't come from from doctors sitting down with pen and paper and figuring stuff out. It came from field research, trail and error on alive and dead subjects. Subjects that two world wars provided by the millions. It just so happened to be that those subjects were mostly white men between 14 and 50 years of age in dire need of medical treatment. Naturally our knowledge of male physiology skyrocketed during and after that period. On the contrary, when it comes to psychology, men are light years behind women. While trying to """cure female hysteria""", we got a far deeper look into the function of our brains on the female side than on the male side. Even though most of these women took part as voluntarily as someone would take shrapnel in the war. I'm trying to say that it's not just as simple as men or women have it better, it all boils down to historical availability of patients for research.
@LouNeko @rephlekt2718
It also developed from scientists trying to keep things simple. Women's bodies are a lot more complicated than men's in terms of varying ratios of hormones, pregnancy, etc that have to be accounted for in studies. Same reason HeLa cells and genetically-identical mice are used.
It's still not a justifiable reason to neglect 50% of the population under the incorrect assumption that human physiology is the same across the board.
I'm not sure who's worse. The people planning research who still mistakenly believe that it's correct to just study one group and presume it applies to a group that would have been more complicated to study or the ones who know it doesn't work that way but just pretend it does because it's more convenient.
Don't get me wrong, there are contexts where doing an imperfect job now and trying to fill in the details later is the best strategy. But I don't believe that's actually what's going on most of the time.
It's true that wartime produces massive leaps forward in all sorts of technology. And the military does use and abuse soldiers (of all sexes) for research. But patients involved in medical research are almost always ordinary people, recruited by their doctors. And we've only been doing medical research properly since the 1970s, after the thalidomide scandal happened. The first randomised controlled trial was conducted in 1948.
Most trials avoid recruiting pregnant women, despite the fact that if the trials are successful the treatments will be used in pregnant women (unless known to be mutagenic from animal studies) without any testing at all.
And many trials exclude women because of the risk of pregnancy, or hormonal fluctuations making it more complicated to interpret results (despite hormonal fluctuations in men being just as wild but much less predictable).
I know you feel hard done by. But your perspective is warped. We still have medical professionals debating whether the female orgasm exists, FFS.
As far as I know, treatments for "hysteria" tended to range from quackery at best to sexual assault at worst. You're going to have to do a lot better than a bare unsupported asstertion if you want me to believe science actually learned anything of value from it.
That's why I put it in triple quotes, because I know that hysteria research is questionable at best and straight torture at worst.
Even worse if you're a black woman since a lot of medical people erroneously believe that if you're black, you have a greater tolerance for pain.
I would say that generally speaking the further you are from being a straight white cis-het middle or upper class man who speaks English as his first language without any disabilities the more likely you are to be misunderstood and ignored by the western medical industry. Though the odds for anyone are never quite as close to zero as they so obviously should be (probably in no small part because it is an industry.)