Taking Responsibility

A few things happened the other day. I was talking to someone and they mentioned they had high blood pressure. Just on the off chance, I asked them if they couldn't manage to lower it themselves. They got what I meant, I was not saying "Oh you totally could" I was asking if they were of a mind and had attempted to-in that they responded that they'd become more philosophical about things, in general. But, they still needed medication to manage their condition.

Fair enough.

Later in the evening, I watched a programme about women making choices about how they would give birth. There was an elective Cesarean, a water birth, a lotus birth-which keeps the umbilical cord attached to the placenta, which is carried around; until it withers away on its own- a woman who wished to consume her placenta and a free birth. The last woman wished to give birth on her own, with no one else there except her partner.

Though the often vigorous disapproval there can be wasn't shown, it was clear that this was cause for concern and required the woman to be rather stubborn. The woman who had the water birth I think-was also interesting, she prepared herself to deal with pain by training herself via affirmations and a programme of hypnosis. It included disassociating from it, re-framing sensations and the like.

Again, I was reminded how far away this is from the mainstream doctor/patient relationship and how all this sort of thing would be the norm and the norm not so, if the medical machine really desired us to take "personal responsibility." A term that has been weaponized and mindlessly used to beat fat people into treating hunger-a biological signal as some kind of optional interloper.

I thought, how would one assess the risk run by the free birther? Would it be more aptly calculated according to the specifics of herself and her situation? Or would a general overview be more informative? Perhaps both?

Either way, it would be taking a chance of some kind. How do you reconcile yourself if things go awry? Though medical practice is far more often than we'd like to pretend about mere convention, e.g. laying on your back to give birth, operating outside the medical aegis makes assessment of efficacy harder to ascertain.

It requires a mindset that differs from our expectations now to put "personal responsibility" into meaningful effect. Healthcare systems eschewed interest in 'prevention' until they could see a way to use it to get a hold of directing people and their lives. 

I never quite thought of it this way but I wonder how much that has affected the ability to keep lying about weight loss dieting. That happened mainly outside the medical remit, on the encouragement of the profession.

And despite the bad faith caused by the rejection of reality that was heartily embraced by the public. How many people haven't restricted or dieted at least once? The aim as long as I've been aware has been to keep us dieting and now that another wave of generation/s are seeing through restriction, it has been drawn into the medical aegis as they intend to try and impose it on those trained to be open to this kind of invasion and take over.

Medics could have of course made a partnership of those millions of people, during the dieting years. Encouraging them to take responsibility-if that's what they really wanted. That would have required them to accept the discipline of reality and keep informed of the feedback of millions-[as if they didn't already know.]

Instead that was used to deepen docility by opening a new front, breaking people's will under the guise of breaking a non-existent will to be fat. And the rest is non-history [according to them.]