they're in my skin and my bones

Posts Tagged "healthcare"

I need to think up a career in fighting this prevailing “medical model” bullshit.

Big pharma thinks we’re all morons, and the sad part is we’re proving them right.

"I have really bad news for all of you,” Oransky said. “You all have a universally fatal condition. It’s called pre-death. Every single one of you has it, because you have the risk factor for it, which is being alive."

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The Preposterous Epidemic of Pre-Diseases - Brian Fung - Health - The Atlantic (via denyinghipster)

I’m sorry, but what in fuck’s name?

If you’re on the verge of developing diabetes, you’re “pre-diabetic.” You’ve got “pre-hypertension” if you’re about to be diagnosed with high blood pressure, “pre-anxiety” before getting anxiety, and and “pre-dementia” before dementia. As if actual diseases weren’t frightening enough, we now have what seems like a whole encyclopedia of pre-diseases to fear. What’s with our fixation on inventing new diagnoses by fragmenting old ones, and what kinds of costs does it impose on society?

Preconditions don’t always lead to actual conditions, but that doesn’t stop millions of Americans from seeking treatment of some kind anyway. In fact, over 100,000 people die every year due to complications associated with treating preconditions, according to Ivan Oransky, the executive editor of Reuters Health, who spoke yesterday at TEDMED, a three-day conference in Washington, D.C. on technology and medicine.

(via denyinghipster)
Source: The Atlantic

"As psychiatrists have gone from doing both psychotherapy and prescribing psychiatric drugs to doing basically nothing but writing prescriptions, many of them have fallen into some very bad habits. When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. In this case, when all you have are drugs, everything starts to look like a brain disease."

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David Allen - Bipolar or Borderline? | Psychology Today

"I’m sorry that this is a newsflash to some of you, but we are born dying and will each of us have “problems” that need medical intervention; it is not something to be ashamed of or afraid to experience. It is a condition of being alive and I am shocked that ANYONE WITH A HUMAN BODY would place obstacles in the way of their brothers and sisters getting a pill or a procedure that could help them."

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Rob Delaney

The same goes for education. When your citizens’ minds aren’t stimulated by an excellent education, they don’t have the tools to think up the next life-saving vaccine. A country that doesn’t invest in education cannot claim for one second to be interested in its future. There are plenty of words to describe politicians who don’t make their constituents’ health and education their top priority, but for now I’ll let you pick one somewhere on the spectrum between “misguided” and “evil.” I will insist you tack on the word “shortsighted” as well.

"None of us is master over life and death." »

We do not have a “right to die.” Many people now speak of such a thing, but without the proper understanding of the terminology they use. A “right” is a moral claim. We do not have a claim on death. Rather, death has a claim on us! We do not decide when our life will end, any more than we decided when it began. Much less does someone else — a relative, a doctor, or a legislator–decide when our life will end.

Want to know how I knew a deeply religious person wrote this? The claim that humans cannot control life. Yes, actually, we can. It’s called birth control. And abortion.

But also how I knew is this shameful contradiction:

But does such a fate mean that we have a right to demand of our society to terminate our life at the time of our choosing ? Is the fact that suffering faces us as our bodies decay mean that we have the right to ‘opt out’ at government expense? I think not.

If assisted suicide is not the answer, what is? The answer offered through our medical system is palliative care. The WHO defines it as an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problem associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual. It is the act of offering to accompany one through the final stages of life for it is the fear of facing death alone that is a root fear for all humanity.

First, the writer complains about governments paying for terminally ill people to end their lives. Then he suggests the answer is… to pay for long term (months or years) palliative care, while the patient is miserable and barely functioning, and requires hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars worth of services a day.

Makes perfect sense. Because God wants people to suffer, after all. We can’t go peacefully into that good night, nope. Not in this mortal life.
mohandasgandhi: theweekmagazine: The non-partisan Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a report on Tuesday recommending that birth control be classified as preventive medicine under President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The IOM says such a change would lower the rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion, help women better space out their pregnancies, and spur a number of beneficial health developments for women. If the Department of Health and Human Services adopts this guideline, insurers would have to cover 100 percent of the cost of contraceptives, with no co-pay. This needs to happen. Many women can barely afford their birth control because of how expensive it is. How on Earth are they then supposed to afford a baby? This ^

mohandasgandhi:

theweekmagazine:

The non-partisan Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a report on Tuesday recommending that birth control be classified as preventive medicine under President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The IOM says such a change would lower the rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion, help women better space out their pregnancies, and spur a number of beneficial health developments for women.

If the Department of Health and Human Services adopts this guideline, insurers would have to cover 100 percent of the cost of contraceptives, with no co-pay.

This needs to happen. Many women can barely afford their birth control because of how expensive it is. How on Earth are they then supposed to afford a baby?

This ^

 Source: theweek.com