I actually have an answer for this!

It comes back to the issue of medical (in)visibility.

Clinical medicine was founded upon the logic of pathology; it became concerned with mapping illness to visible (and eventually measurable) sites of pathology…
At roughly the same time as “the birth of the clinic” the period following the French Revolution saw the abolition of social institutions associated with the Ancien Régime, including the previous system of “bedside medicine”…
…so that the medical system in the French Republic became reoriented with the hospital at its center. The hospital brought together large populations of destitute sick people, and a new “collegiate” community of professional medical practitioners.
Per Dr. Mark Sullivan, a physician and philosopher of medicine, the relationships between these populations became organized, “around a nexus of formally defined statuses and strictly defined patterns of deference.”
Thus, the role of the patient, in its modern sense of one who waits and forebears as the passive object of clinical intervention, emerged - and with it, the role of the bad patient, as one who resists or challenges these patterns of deference and acquiescence.
Going back to the issue of medical invisibility, symptoms and illnesses that cannot be mapped to pathologies constitute a challenge to the authority of clinical and pathological ways of knowing.
So, the sick people who present with them are themselves a challenge to the clinic, and this they become bad patients.

Thus, their deviance is moral rather than somatic, and they must “want to be sick.”
The fix for this is to abolish the clinic.

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More from @alexhaagaard

19 Jun
CW: photo of blood

Do y’all want a really vivid example of what I mean when I say medical invisibility does not mean the same thing as regular invisibility?

You would think that when a wound like this bleeds like this, doctors wouldn’t ignore that right? Alex holds up their forearm...Alex holding up their forea...
But when they can’t correlate that excessive bleeding to your platelet count or to a vitamin K or clotting factor deficiency, that is EXACTLY what they will do.

They will turn their heads from the photos and very literally refuse to see it.
When you finally figure out the cause on your own (heparin release from overactive mast cells), they will refuse to acknowledge it as a valid sign of a flare, and an indication that they need to adjust your meds.
Read 6 tweets
14 Jun
1. I wondered about it a fair growing up and funnily, I was routinely pegged as queer by the other kids. But I didn’t have the language to describe my queer identities and thus to realize I actually “counted” til my mid to late twenties. #30DaysOfDisabledPride
2. Similarly, I always knew my bodymind was “different” growing up. I was a sickly, neurodivergent kid the latter of which was especially problematized by my teachers though no one ever bothered to label it with anything others than slurs or euphemisms. #30DaysOfDisabledPride
2 [cont’d]. I claimed disability when applying to university for the purpose of having access to accommodations (not that they made any) but I felt like I was cheating by claiming something I had no right to. #30DaysOfDisabledPride
Read 7 tweets
10 May
[medical BS]

So, I recently figured out that the months-long symptom flare I've been experiencing seems to be due to my progestin pill losing efficacy.

It's been more than 2 years since I last saw my gyno so I knew they'd require me to get a new referral... 🧵
...which typically means you drop down to the bottom of the waitlist, which means waiting several months for an appointment (this was pre-pandemic mind you and I don't imagine the wait time has gotten shorter).
[abuse]

So I left a message, literally begging them to make an exception. I explained that in 2019 I had moved out of region to escape an abusive living situation, and that for the first year I could not afford to rent a car to drive 240km for a non-urgent appointment.
Read 7 tweets
27 Apr
What the exact fuck goes through someone’s head as they make the decision to keep reaching for a cowering dog as that dog’s human says FIVE FUCKING TIMES “stop doing that, she’s scared of you.”

/rhetorical
Like is this really a situation where you feel comfortable fucking around and finding out?
“But she’s wagging her tail”

Yeah dogs do that when they’re terrified, jackass
Read 4 tweets
19 Apr
I want everyone to be very, very clear that what is being described here is a blanket and systematic discrimination against disabled people in Canada receiving *any non-emergent healthcare.*

bbc.com/news/disabilit… Text: ‘Gaslighting the patient' Revealingly, Canada Care C
This is why it actively hurts me to see people claim that it is easier to access care here.

I. Have. No. Ongoing. Healthcare.

None.
I am alive right now because I have a background in pathobiology and design which afforded me the expertise to read and analyze clinical literature, and the confidence to realize that if the healthcare system was content to let me die, I needed to find a way to save my own life.
Read 7 tweets
5 Apr
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.
Read 4 tweets

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