Perhaps one of the deeper ironies of ableism in medicine leading to assumptions of medical fraud, is that peoples latent media saturated ableism leads people faking medical conditions to do so in highly obvious ways
Media portrayals are also a large cause. You’d be surprised at how many people tried to fake anterograde amnesia based off its portrayal in Memento.
There’s a reason the people who do convincing medical fraud often have a background in medicine, or in some cases (like with drug addiction resulting from treatment for an injury), actually had the underlying condition but eventually recovered
Also mind you I have basically no moral qualms with medical fraud as long as scarce resources aren’t at issue. Idc if people lie to get drugs bc drugs should be legal, and idc if people lie to get out of prison because people shouldn’t go to prison.
But, just for me, having had vastly too many experiences where I really had a condition but wasn’t believed, I don’t want to tempt fate myself, personally.
The illegal market for ADHD meds exists because ADHD meds are over prescribed to people who don’t need them and are systematically denied to people that do. Same is more or less true for opiates and many other psychiatrics & narcotics.
Anyway the thing which prompted this thread was watching like 30 videos of different middle class suburban white women faking adverse vaccine responses and people throwing money at them. Shit’s wild.
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