Thread by @Medical_Nemesis

Two ways to make a diagnosis: one more in line with the traditional role of the physician, the other adapted to modern healthcare demands—are at odds with one another /1 alertandoriented.com/whats-a-diagno…

When you learn how concepts such as diagnosis or a definition of disease change over time, you understand how people may manipulate you and your reality. Then you can agree or deny what is done to you. /2

For example, to collect payment from an insurance physician codes your condition as chronic pain because what you feel or experience meets criteria of a chronic pain. /3

Yet there is little use for you to be plagued by the doom of thinking of yourself as perpetually sick when definitions of chronic illness vary hugely and serve interests that may not be your best interests. /4

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

In case of pain, you are either in pain now or you aren’t. If you aren’t in pain now, the fact that you may be in pain again in the future largely doesn’t matter now. You may as well enjoy being well. /5

Conscious rejection of diagnosis of chronic pain may allow you to find ways to be well and pain free majority of the time. Unconscious agreement may lock you into perception it’s your unquestionable destiny. /6

When I say you don’t have to play games you don’t want to play, I mean you can reject reality others are forcing into you. You can live your truth and form your reality that serves your interests not others. /7

Another consequence of a diagnosis - a shift of who has capacity and capability to deal with what you suffer. For thousands of years we as individuals and communities knew how to deal with a handful of sufferings - pain, nausea, a limp, swelling... suffering was familiar. /8

Today you face thousands of unfamiliar diagnoses that even doctors may not know how to address. This was the exact political manipulation of Covid diagnosis fear tactic in March - its new! we don’t know what to do with it. /9

Yet we do know what to do when we are short of breath, have aches and pains, when our stomach is upset. The diagnosis might have been new, but the our sufferings are ancient and familiar. /10

You can handle old and familiar suffering by yourself or with minimal help from a doctor. An unfamiliar diagnosis renders your an object to be treated by an expert. /11

Ivan Illich consciously denied what could have been diagnosed as cancer and lived coping with familiar sufferings that his growing jaw tumor presented. He didn’t treat the future prognosis rather focusing on present - do I have a problem now? /12

You can learn more about the experience of Ivan Illich and an example of reality and truth that is different from what could be forced onto you in the book Dying is not Death by Lee Hoinacki /13