Monday, March 16, 2015

American Medecine

    At my last chiropractic appointment, I jumped up out of my waiting room chair to share a sudden thought with the receptionist.  We only bond with or understand one another when we're sick, I explained.  Or, as I've often ruminated, we're eager to help one another die, but don't assist each other in being alive.
     There is no dearth of talk show features on the latest medically identified disease or the narrative of someone's survival of cancer or other life-threatening illness.  In the ultimate symbiosis of life and death, we provided the throwaways of Guantanamo with state-of-the-art technologies in a final sentimental apology for having imprisoned them.  I once worked with a woman with whose relationship I struggled. She did make the effort to visit me in an intensive care unit, but regularly shucked opportunities for simple gestures of social interest.  I have what could possibly be considered a macabre empathy with those who live in extremis, i.e. isolated in prison cells, politically persecuted, stranded in starvation or caught in the snares of war.  I'm unafraid of being perceived as callous at the nausea I feel with the endless parade of bald children who suffer from the side effects of chemotherapy.  They, at least, are from families affluent enough to afford treatment.  I'm unwilling to shove aside my emotional involvement with people tottering on the brink of extinction to reach out in spirit for those who have merely suffered some interruption to their complacency.
     Then there is the other angle.  Of late, I've evolved almost a kind of embarrassment at visiting medical offices.  In the barren landscape of my social life the thought has begun to intrude that in keeping these seemingly endless appointments that they also provide a kind of sociability and good will.  It's too easy to get on board the campaigns of the American Medical Association.  As part of my participation in the local mental health community, I've been subjected to endless moralizations about cigarette smoking.  Besides the fact that I'm more concerned with the financial devastation poor people expose themselves to, I'm impressed with the hypocrisy with the associated issues, including second hand smoke.  I remember a time when a simple opportunity to smoke recreationally in drinking establishments was still inside the law.  What about the kind of moral destitution that leads to addictions?  What kind of even simple gestures have been made to address the desperation of those caught up in the routine demoralization of either poverty or the ennui and alienation of suburban shopping mall culture or the stranded rich? People should be allowed to kill themselves slowly or dramatically, in my never very humble opinion, rather than be subjected to the sentimental swill of moral inculcation.
     Anyway, I'm of the mind these days to excuse myself from the scare tactics of advanced imaging and medical procedures designed to produce evidence that the chances of your life coming to a conclusion are mathematically increased.  What's the point of extended your life if it's not worth living to begin with.