Thread by @jenbrea

You know, it’s taken me awhile to come to this realization, but dropping out of graduate school, losing your career, not having your intended children, and being bedridden for seven years because your neurologists fucked up is…kind of a big fucking deal.

It strikes me as an outcome that should maybe be…counted in aggregate statistics, and that people should be held accountable. Instead, it is 100% invisible to the medical system, the cost borne entirely by myself, my family, and our society. And there are MILLIONS of us.

I was reflecting on my Twitter feed and why I rail on about this. It occurred to me it’s because this (right now) is the only space where this reality can exist. If you counted us and there was accountability for medical fuck-ups/neglect/gaslighting/abuse etc., I’d have no need.

But right now, medicine is (one of the last) noble priesthoods, with all the self-awareness and accountability that noble priesthoods usually entail. (i.e., scant.) And yes, there are absolutely incredible doctors out there, but they are not the norm.

We need to stop automatically lionizing whole classes of people just because we are terrified of disability and death and want to believe in the magic/superiority/infallibility of our doctors or our medical systems (cough, NHS) and start to see things as they really are.

It is ugly, and by the time you get sick, it’s too late to start caring.

Our whole society has contributed to this: the med schools that use absolutely the wrong admissions criteria and curricula; the residency hazing; the shitty systems of rationing that oppress doctors and distort science and reality; the TV fairytales we tell about it all.

By “neurologists fucked up” I mean diagnosed you with hysteria rather than observing the patent abnormalities on your MRI, ordering additional testing, or doing fairly basic clinical exams and *believing the results.*

(No, their diagnostic algorithms do not train them to do this but they still have eyes and brains.)

I wonder how different my life might have been if rather than reach for the easy “nothing to see here” Get Out of Jail Free card, my doctors had kept working under the premise that I WAS SICK.

That truly only happens on TV. Most patients with most doctors get one, maybe two tests. If the answer isn’t blatantly obvious, you basically get kicked to the curb. True investigation and observation doesn’t really exist in modern medicine, not for the average patient.

I have no answers or solutions, but I know that it all starts with seeing the problem, which requires measurement, which is not going to be initiated from within the healthcare system itself. It also requires forcing the medical system to internalize the costs.