Friday's Open Thread

[hollzilla]

You're free to comment about anything, whether it relates to the interests of the community or not.

No nudity, please.
If you post pictures, please don't make them so big that people have to side scroll. (If you're unsure about a picture, just link us to it instead.)
No personal attacks.

Comments

[kaowolfie]

No, you just felt you had to come up to me when I'm talking about people constantly recommending or espousing the virtues of "alternative medicine", as soon as they figure out I'm disabled, and felt the need to announce that you think it worked for you. With the unspoken subtext, unless you are so very different from the bulk of people who buy into alt medicine, that it would work for me if I'd just try it. Do you really need another explanation of why doing that is so offensive and frankly ableist, aside from the one in my original complaint? Fine, then:

Once people realize I'm broken, either because they see my cane or I mention my meds or I jump up and scream from pain, this is how it goes: They start saying I need to try sun gazing or organic food or homeopathy or Reiki or acupuncture or $alternative_"medicine"_thing, because their cousin's sister's best friend's piano teacher's coworker used it for their vague knee pain and it like totally cured them. And that means it will somehow cure my INCURABLE DISORDER, and I must really want to stay sick if I don't immediately beg to know more about this miracle treatment so I can stop taking those nasty pills. Then they throw in a dose of shaming about how I obviously want to be a drug addict, sniff because I got offended when they "just wanted to help", and write me off as another angry cripple, never the once thinking that they were just horrifically ableist, rude, and patronizing.

"Alternative" medicine does not work and is not medical treatment, because to paraphrase Dara O Briain, the stuff that works became plain old medicine. Like aspirin did. There's zero coherent reason to think alt med things will work, but somehow randomized trials get done anyway and at best, after wasting grant dollars, it's discovered that magic water (or whatever) works as well as a placebo. Yet thanks to people insisting that if this stuff has been around "so long" then it must work, people rely on it instead of actual treatment and die from easily treated things like diabetes, because hey, they totally felt better.

[dawnduskdancer]

And that means it will somehow cure my INCURABLE DISORDER, and I must really want to stay sick if I don't immediately beg to know more about this miracle treatment so I can stop taking those nasty pills. Then they throw in a dose of shaming about how I obviously want to be a drug addict, sniff because I got offended when they "just wanted to help", and write me off as another angry cripple
Arrgh! I had a friend lecture me like this when i told her my mother was on chemo. Because chemo is *bad for you* or something. To this day I wish I'd had the nerve to reply "You know what's worse for you than chemo? TERMINAL FUCKING BREAST CANCER!"
(I also had a drunken argument with a friend of a friend over whether I have a right to take medication for my various mental health issues. Because anxiety, depression, and ADD are all in my head and I should just "learn to live with them" or some such bullshit)
/rant.