I feel like most people assume that my hatred of medicine comes from my experiences as a patient.

But nah, most of it actually comes from the years I spent inside that culture.
Like just on the basis of my experiences as a patient I’ve obviously got a good, solid baseline level of rage.
But it’s knowing how doctors talk about their patients to other “insiders,” how medical students are trained to think about their patients, and what qualities are selected for by the systems that train them that keep me from thinking the clinic is redeemable.
And no, I’m not interested in hearing “things have changed.” It’s been all of a decade, I see how y’all still talk to each other on here, and I know you’re saving the really bad shit for your group chats.

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More from @alexhaagaard

2 Apr
This appointment is going to go SO well Screenshot of a section from a clinical questionnaire, label
They asked if there was anything else I thought they should know about 😃 Text: "I am aware taking herbal medications is risky an
The cool thing about receiving absolutely no goddamn healthcare is that I no longer give a flying fuck what they think of me as a patient because what exactly are they gonna do, give me less than zero care somehow??
Read 4 tweets
1 Apr
Anyway, I'm just gonna go ahead and thread about my experiences with it, because it's hard to describe accurately in general terms.

But this has been one of the biggest factors that has prevented me from doing physio/strength-building exercises over the years.
It resembles Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness, which is a common and well-known phenomenon, in that it's highly localized, and involves aching and loss of muscle strength in a particular muscle group, about 24-48 hours after exercising that muscle group.
What I've never been sure about is whether the magnitude of what I experience is "normal."

Because all resources on DOMS are just like "hurting's normal but if it hurts too much you're working too hard and it shouldn't like...immobilize you or anything."
Read 12 tweets
31 Mar
[medical bullshit]

For #TransDayOfVisibility, I want to talk a little about medical transitioning with medical trauma.

I've got medical PTSD from a whole slew of stuff, ranging from medical assault to literally 3 decades of gaslighting me about my embodied reality...
...so for a long time, I didn't even consider medical transition because I didn't feel comfortable allowing medical professionals to get their grimy little violent hands anywhere near my gender.
But over the past year, as my mental health has healed slightly, and I've watched trans friends and acquaintances begin their medical transitions, it was something I became more interested in.

So at the start of January, I called the local gender clinic to make an appointment.
Read 9 tweets
6 Feb
We’re doing social model discourse tonight so here’s some stuff to know:

a) the social model, as originally formulated, explicitly defined disability as the oppression that is experienced by those whose bodies/minds are *perceived* as deviant...
...which, intentionally or not, leaves out a lot of disabled people. While there have been attempts to rehabilitate the model to address the experiences of those with chronic pain, as far as I have been able to find, there has been no attempt to comprehensively resolve...
...the problem that medically invisible disability poses to the model’s assumptions, or to contend with the impact that those assumptions have had on the advocacy and policy shaped by the social model.
Read 10 tweets
28 Dec 20
Winter’s awesome because literally every time I walk the dog I end up wanting to cry out of exasperation and pain because everything is so goddamn inaccessible #NEISvoid
I just got stuck on a patch of black ice for about five minutes because these assholes who can afford a $500,000 house apparently can’t afford a snow shovel and sand.
Then I got stuck at an intersection because the pedestrian button stops working in subzero temps and the lights won’t change at night without it. So I had to cross the other way and jump a curb cut that’s hazardous when it’s not covered in snow, to try the opposite button.
Read 4 tweets
13 Dec 20
Pretty sure @bennessb has talked about this before, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how symptomatic (descriptive) diagnoses do very different things than etiological (mechanistic) diagnoses, and how rarely that difference is acknowledged in clinical practice. #NEISvoid
Symptomatic diagnoses are valid and important to accessing things like disabilities accommodations and palliative care. But they’re often treated as an endpoint in the diagnostic process, while etiological diagnoses are important in accessing effective treatment -
- especially when a single symptomatic diagnosis can result from a variety of different etiologies.

Moreover, symptomatic diagnoses are linked to the phenomenon of medically invisible disability:
Read 5 tweets

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