As retired MD (allergist) with lab background in cell and molecular biology and immunology, after working ~30 years in field, it’s my impression from experience and reading the “Medical Letter” as well as on-going immunology literature- 1) drugs are placebos- they work b/c patients are vulnerable to my expectations it will work. 2) patients have flares of a condition in order to reconnect with a provider (who has more power relatively) – like a battery being recharged. 3) When anxiety behaviors flare, there’s more nail biting, picking, and face touching- giving us opportunity to pick up pathogens.
4) doctors represent power totems – they have the power. Weakened individuals need them to feel cared for in a society that otherwise considers most wo(e)-man as throwaway the minute they finish child-bearing or their looks fade. With today’s medical establishment, they get lots of attention in a completely unnatural atmosphere.
5) when you visit medical establishment for any reason, you fill out a questionnaire focusing on ~horrible maladies. If you’ve had one, you focus on that instance when you were terrified and vulnerable; going to the specialist you get another new list of possibilities. By the time you see a provider you’re well focused on that – not your healthy habits – which doctors give short shrift, nor your improvements.
We need more hands on healing. We need to hug longer, kiss our palms, sing out loud your vowel sounds (lovingly, like you’re being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize – not like when mom yelled your full name). Focus on health. We are using food as a surrogate for closeness.
Illness, injuries, and being sick show us who truly care and love us. If a collective is adrift from their purpose, having a sick member gives focus. I write about this in my “collectives” essay here. https://drjenwyman-clemons.com/2024/01/23/collectives/
Instead of focusing on more illness we need adult community centers with workshops, tutors, and ongoing ed programs that is underwritten by feds and expanded by philanthropists and supported by locals creating them.
These would include up-to-date approaches to culinary, sewing, wood-working, and metal shop worlds.You could always add another skill and gain badges. You can sell your crafts and pay the taxes.
Be celebrated. Have opportunity for those specializing in one to both have conferences (enhancing tourism revenues) and gain new skills if they should choose.
Most patients are stuck in ruts with no way out. They hate their life and are now immersed in toxic and frightening media. Give them one that is healthy and uplifting!
As each hu(e)-man being is actually a probabilistic electron cloud of density, meaning we’re in essence less than 3% substance, our heart especially, is exquisitely sensitive to the power of words let alone actions.
Language (and milieu) training begins in utero. Language acquisition is from mom and how she speaks in her world; it is further substantiated by (a much more mysterious) dad’s input. Power and hierarchy is taught and mirrored by mom’s reactions to her environment; she usually slows whatever she’s doing (loses power) when her man comes home. She doesn’t slow for everyone.
Fetus, a water being, absorbs all of this. Just needs to be born with eyes open to put it all together and learn who is who.
Measuring kids, like measuring light, splits them up and changes them – to favor more of one strength than another when they have barely lived life. For the next 60 years, they say, “I’m no good at this or that” and immediately get flustered when you present them with a test of the subject that initially flustered them. Now we’ve weaponized flustering with this thing called mental status tests – and use those results to strip them of their live worth and assets. This is truly evil. When middling students are measured, they are crippled even though later they may become successful and famous for something non-school oriented later, many do not. They become seedy (“C-D”) instead.
Schools need to ditch report cards and award earned badges instead. This is reviewed in my souk school essay below.
What you focus on you get more of. Give people a way to be honored and re-empowered by gaining recognition for their hand (and heart) creations. Let collectives of friendships form based on similar tangible interests. This would cross cultures!
I’ve written my proposal to many educational addresses. Here is a summary of it:https://drjenwyman-clemons.com/2025/04/25/summary-of-souk-school-and-collective-its-value-and-blessings/
Vaccines are especially effective (measuring responsive antibody levels) in individuals who’d do fine anyway with the illness. We’ve enhanced our society with individuals who can’t mount responses by protecting them with herd effect. Good for them, but don’t require the rest to have a shot. Wearing masks cuts down on transfer of germs from our 18 inch- aerosol biome floating around us – and reminds us to speak carefully.
My personal medical story: whilst in a very unsupportive marriage, married to a busy surgeon, and working at the army hospital (Madigan), I started to have persistent low back pain. I was running 4-6 miles a day.
I was diagnosed with spondylolisthesis and eventually operated on. Since at that time I only had strong exercise to keep my moods in check- which was now limited, I used medications instead. I took daily low dose opiods and muscle relaxants b/c NSAIDS bothered my stomach and intestines. “Allergic to Opiods” was put on my record – code for drug-seeking or dependent.
Then ten years later, after a series of several losses (I’d left my beloved life of physician; my mother, cat, and dog died,me now ex- asked for a divorce). I was broken. About 3 weeks after the latter, I was invited to meet a team of chiropractors because my writing interested them.
One of them more than a decade my junior, made an appointment with me for Reiki. Reiki is primarily meditative – and, as I learned, uniting.
During this appointment, he said several things that were disconcerting – and flattering at the same time. At the end of the appointment said one last thing (“You can do anything you want”) referring to the payment which we’d discussed only theoretically during my ‘interview’. With that, I became intrusively possessed by (his?) loving spirit (there’s actually much more to this story – I’m abbreviating it).
Since then and for last 6 years I’ve had ongoing sense of having my heart ripped open. OK widened inexorably. From all over my being, I feel a sense of rapture and uplifting whenever I’m quiet. Yes, I wrote about this too in a series of ongoing “L.D.” for love daemon, essays, almost 20 so far.
I’m ~off all medications and my back discomfort isn’t that prominent. I manage my home, garden(s), and take ballet classes four times a week on-line. I laugh a lot more, and yes, I cry too. I had no idea how stuck I was previously! And yet, I have NO WHERE TO GO – other than grocery shopping, where I can have fun and talk and meet new people! How can we be “indivisible with liberty and justice for all”, when we’ve only been divided?
What you think is reality, I assure you, isn’t.
