My mother has been experiencing back pain for a few months now, and insists her chiropractor is making it “tolerable.”
Whenever I plead with her to see a doctor or a physical therapist, or suggest that maybe the chiropractor is the problem she gets very upset with me. There is no convincing her of any alternative, she won’t even get a second opinion and I’m not quite sure how to help at this point.
My sister got her got her an appointment to see a massage therapist, which she went to and said nothing but good things about, but she will not budge on the chiropractor.
I dunno maybe I’ll just shut up about it, but it all just seems like quackery to me.
Medicine will always be like that under capitalism, because it is true: as a patient, you are a profit vector for the hospital and all the medical suppliers. It is therefore rational to treat patients as so many dollar bills flowing through the campus.
Only when medicine is not a means for profit, but instead a means for humanization itself - for reduction of suffering, either by cure or by palliation - will it be possible for the patient experience to be tolerable. Otherwise it’s about as futile as wishing for capitalist reforms to solve the labor problem in general.