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Alex Haagaard (they / them) Profile picture
Alex Haagaard (they / them)
@alexhaagaard
Design research, anti-clinical medicine, critical disability shitposting. Opinions = my own.
Apr 27, 2023 • 8 tweets • 1 min read
"Why don't you trust that doctors know what they're talking about?"

Urgent Care: You're not showing any signs of myocarditis

Cardiologist: The notes from when you went to urgent care say you may have had myocarditis Like there are three possibilities for what happened here and none of them indicate even a basic level of professional competence
Jan 30, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Resume tip for Autistic folks:

TIL "highlighting impact" doesn't mean "guess or invent how your work is impacting the company or your client and start sobbing when you can't"

It just means "list your concrete deliverables and add numbers about them wherever you can" So like, "Conducted market research to support disability inclusion strategy for [client] (online survey, semi-structured interviews)"

becomes...
Jan 30, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
[med trauma]

The doc who proceeded with a bone marrow biopsy after the nurse fucked up the morphine drip, and who told her to hold me down while he did it

The doc who said I was disturbing everyone in the ER with my screaming and diagnosed a GI bleed as conversion disorder [med trauma]

The sleep specialist who told me I was depressed and wasn't trying hard enough to control my sleep cycle (I am narcoleptic)

The paramedic who misdiagnosed a severe asthma attack as a meth overdose and joked with the triage nurse about sexually assaulting me
Jan 28, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Another thing, I think a lot of folks are interpreting this Discourse as being about insincere attempts to feel less guilty for eating in restaurants.

But invisibly disabled people have long been framed as dangerous to class consciousness and disability rights. Because in insisting upon the embodied realities of our illnesses we are viewed as desiring our own subjugation by the clinical gaze.
Dec 14, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
An aspect of brain fog / executive dysfunction / sensory overload that I don't see talked about very much is what it means when it becomes really difficult for your brain to separate "signal" from "noise"

So like, in the classic example of "just misplacing your keys"... ...it's not only that you have absolutely no idea where to begin looking for your keys

(because you didn't put them on the kitchen counter instead of the hall table, you put them in the fridge or maybe the medicine cabinet)

it's that you can be staring directly at your keys...
Nov 15, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
So it turns out if you hang onto all your old glasses and you're really lucky, you can get a pretty good estimate of your new optical prescription🙃 It also turns out you can get a set of optical trial frames for about $40 on ebay and a set of optical trial lenses for about $300.

Which seems like it might be a good starting point for an anarchist medical resource center 🤔
Nov 15, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
So I decided to give in and pay for an eye exam out of pocket since there's no sign of when this job action will end and I can barely see and according to the clinic I just called they're "not allowed" to let OHIP-covered patients pay out of pocket

WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK I haven't had a fucking eye exam in 5 fucking years bc my old caseworker misinformed me abt my coverage and then a pandemic happened and now I've got everything on my browser at 150% zoom and am still struggling to read any of it

And apparently that's just too damn bad for me
Aug 12, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
And to be clear I brought this to their attention in the context of a conversation where they asked @elizejackson and I to beta-test Spaces for accessibility purposes.

We pointed out that the concept is temporally inaccessible at its core and that this would need to be addressed @elizejackson When we said we could not agree to help them to "improve" the accessibility of a feature that we would never actually use because it is fundamentally inaccessible to us unless there was a commitment to addressing that form of inaccessibility...
Aug 12, 2021 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Another thing: part of why certain digital access needs get ignored like this has to do with the way we as a society don't consider pain or discomfort or energetic expenditure as legitimate access concerns. "Access barrier" gets defined as "can literally, absolutely not do the thing without accommodation"

If you can *technically* do the thing but it causes you so much pain or fatigue you can't do anything else for the rest of the day, that gets deemed illegitimate, and ignored.
Aug 10, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
These flash cards were created by an org that calls itself Patient Revolution to help patients and clinicians reflect on "communication barriers" they experience.

Anyone else notice a...fairly substantial thematic difference between the patient and clinician cards? 🤔 Set of eight rectangular ca...Set of eight flash cards th... This is the crux of my problem with doctor-led "patient-led" healthcare initiatives.

They will produce something that lays bare how the the problem they need to solve is about systemic power imbalance...and chalk it up to communication and personal reflection.
Aug 9, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
It's really cool how ODSP claims that disabled people being in work is desirable and also has no framework to account for the unique expenses disabled people incur in order to access work Me: I literally spend hundreds of dollars a month on OTC meds and non-prescription assistive devices without which I would literally not be able to work

ODSP: lol bummer
Jul 14, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
There are a ton of issues with this concept but the majority of the criticisms it's receiving iseen to be ignoring those in favour of a #PeeledOrangePhenomenon framing 🤨 [Video shows what is essentially an automated Murphy bed in operation - a bed descends from the ceiling along a motorized track, merging with the sofa and covering the coffee table in a studio apartment living space]
Jul 12, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Was kind of surprised this morning by how relatable people seemed to find this and literally just realized most of them probably aren't interpreting it as doubting yourself *because* your colleagues are congratulating you 😬 Quote tweet image: a meme showing Ed Milliband and Greta Thunberg standing side-by-side. Milliband is clapping while looking solemnly and directly at Thunberg who is wearing a look of Autistic uncertainty/discomfort. Text over Milliband says "My colleagues congratulating me...
Jul 12, 2021 • 19 tweets • 4 min read
One of my favourite examples of this was when my former allergist told me to stop taking the Benadryl that was newly regulating my sleep architecture. Now, this man is an unmitigated jackass who smirked when I asked if my narcolepsy could be linked to my MCAS and laughed when I described symptoms of exercise-induced anaphylaxis (despite having authored one of the most-cited papers on EIA)
Jul 12, 2021 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
This applies for so many medical issues and treatments, too.

I don't advocate for plant medicines out of some "natural is better" belief, and there are massive benefits to using pharmaceuticals when you can.

But...there is so much that could be readily available... ...but is rendered inaccessible because we are so thoroughly ingrained with the belief that self-medicine is dangerous.

And yes! It is! So is clinical medicine! I've had serious adverse drug reactions laughed out of the ER because "I've never heard of that happening"
Jun 21, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
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”…
Jun 19, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
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.
Jun 14, 2021 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
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
May 10, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
[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).
Apr 27, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
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?
Apr 19, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
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.