There’s an interesting post over at D.B.’s Medical Rants blog from a woman whose son has his own blog on personal responsibility where health care is concerned. The post in question is a poem that argues for a good, simple, clean, heartfelt, humane lifestyle in work and deed–accompanied by walks and swims. And the point of course is that when human beings take care of themselves both physically and spiritually they live longer, have fewer health problems, and who in his or her right mind wouldn’t want this?
I know I want this. I also know thousands of people with disabilities who always take care of themselves to the best of their abilities. I appreciate the mantra of self -responsibility as a component of the health care debate that’s currently underway in the United States. Yet I also know that a person with a disability who does her or his best to take thought for the quality of life still must work and engage a system of medical care that remains largely inattentive and confounded by disability issues. When doctors and nurses are not on your side it’s much harder to fashion a pro-active and well mannered life of progressive health practices. Let’s be more specific:
A woman who uses a wheelchair and who also has no use of her hands is told by a nurse that her chair won’t fit into the receiving room, so they’ll have to take her medical information out in the corridor of the clinic. This violates confidentiality laws and the patient says so. The nurse walks away. No one comes back. Eventually the woman with the wheelchair just goes home.
The above incident is legion for people with disabilities.
My argument such as it is, is that medical staff must be properly trained to assist those with disabilities who are trying to take care of themselves to actually accomplish the goal.
This is a team effort.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
There’s also another facet to this: there are so many charities, self-help groups, etc. that focus on a particular disability, or illness. From experience with friends, as an example, I will cite breast cancer prevention, which has HUGE visibility and lots of supporters. All media support focuses on healthy diet, exercise, ‘recommended’ body weight, low alcohol consumption, early pregnancy, breastfeeding – all of these are of course factors for lowering breast cancer statistics. But the corporate-industry factors: radiation emissions, coal dust, chemicals in our food, water,’personal hygiene’ products, gasoline, and so on ad infinitum, are never cited in the ‘personal responsibility’ roster of the factors of avoiding any kind of cancer, because those factors are controlled by corporations, which by and large deny reponsibility for such ailments. So when we get cancer it’s all our fault, while corporations can blithely continue to pollute our air/water/etc. with no comeback. Every time you pick up a plastic bottle of soap to wash your dishes, you’re handling over a hundred chemicals that have been devised in the past hundred years, while your body is still dealing with its evolution of 100,000 or more years ago. But then Repugs don’t believe in evolution, and they probably own a lot of stock in Dow Chemical and compatriots.
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amen!
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