Comments | fayanora: Another reason why we need socialized health care

fayanora

Another reason why we need socialized health care

Jul 26, 2009 02:50

A friend of kengr's, who has fibromyalgia (the friend, not kengr), told me today that one of the ways fibromyalgia can be triggered is thus: the brain sends out pain signals meant to tell the individual "STOP THAT! YOU'RE MAKING THE DAMAGE WORSE!" and the person ignores the pain. The brain, thinking it's not getting through, goes into overload, turning ( Read more... )

socialized medicine, interesting stuff, pain, science, fibromyalgia, society sucks, thought of the day

Comments 8

Yes... ysabetwordsmith July 26 2009, 17:17:53 UTC

Another widespread and rapidly growing example is repetitive-stress injury. The only way to make that go away is to stop doing the activity that caused it, which sometimes means learning a safer way and sometimes means never being able to do a certain thing for more than a few minutes. But the best approach is to prevent it, which means not doing the same action for so long without a break that you destroy part of your body. For that, we need not only access to health care but an economy designed so that a reasonable amount of work will support a family -- not require people to work so much that the job causes permanent injury.

Re: Yes... christinaathena July 26 2009, 20:35:35 UTC

Ideally, also allowing one to change jobs as one sees fit. Anything can become tedious if done enough, and enjoyable in small quantities. Maintaining a small personal garden can be enjoyable, for example, while working all day every day maintaining lawns can be very wearying.

Re: Yes... ysabetwordsmith July 26 2009, 20:49:55 UTC

That's important too. Another problem in the workplace is hyperspecialization, where jobs get narrower and narrower, so that people wind up doing exactly the same thing all the time. It's not very good for mind or body. Much of what I do is wordsmithing of one sort or another, but I mix up different projects, and I do some other things during the day, such as gardening, cooking, crafts, etc.

Re: Yes... fayanora July 26 2009, 23:06:08 UTC

In Traipah's economic system, the base unit of people is the Guilds. They're often generalized, like "Manufacturing Guild," "Environment Guild" (which is sewage workers, garbage haulers, cleaning people, and landscapers), and "Construction Guild." The generalization allows them to rotate jobs when Guild members get bored or exhausted with one job ( ... )

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