Ivan Illich

[CellularIconoclast]

Better health care will depend not on some new therapeutic standard, but on the level of willingness and competence to engage in self-care.

People would rebel against such an environment if medicine did not explain their biological disorientation as a defect in their health, rather than as a defect in the way of life which is imposed on them or which they impose on themselves.

Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn’t organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.

Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes on a healthy diet in an environment equally fit for birth, growth, work, healing and dying; they are sustained by a culture than enhances the conscious acceptance of limits to population, of ageing, of incomplete recovery and ever-imminent death. Healthy people need minimal bureaucratic interference to mate, give birth, share the human condition, and die.

 

[Blossom]

From Ivan Illich author of Medical Nemesis- chapter 2 The medicalization of life:

...when medical bureaucracy creates ill health by increasing stress, by multiplying disabling dependence, by generating new painful needs, by lowering the levels of discomfort for tolerance for pain, by reducing the leeway that people are wont to concede to an individual when he suffers, and by abolishing the right to self care. Social iatrogenesis is at work when health-care is turned into a standardized item, a staple;when all suffering is "hospitalized" and homes become inhospitable to birth, sickness and death; when the language in which people could experience their bodies is turned into bureaucratic gobbledygook; or when suffering, mourning and healing outside the patient role are labeled a form of deviance.

Sounds familiar.

 

[Blossom]

More from Medical Nemesis in chapter 1 The Epidemics of Modern Medicine Ivan wrote:

As the older causes of disease recede, a new kind of malnutrition is becoming the most rapidly expanding modern epidemic. One third of humanity survives on a level of undernourishment which would have formerly been lethal, while more and more rich people absorb ever greater amounts of poisons and mutagens in their food.

We can survive the undernourished state but that requires medical interventions. Save yourself, Eat well!

 

[Blossom]

Ivan wrote:

But medicine tells us as much about the meaningful performance of healing, suffering and dying as chemical analysis tells us about the aesthetic value of pottery.

Source: Medical Nemesis

 

[Blossom]

I re-read Medical Nemesis this weekend and found it very enlightening. I particularly enjoyed Ivan's insights into how much as a culture we have let medicine take over all aspects of our lives. As someone who considers herself quite open-minded and critical of the medical field I was pretty shocked at how deep rooted the belief in medicine as a necessary entity has been in my own life. The book basically exposes how little medicine has contributed to our health as a population while bringing to light the insidious harm it causes on a personal and societal level. Ivan wrote this book in the 1970's but I found it still relevant in many ways to what is currently happening today. My favorite part of the book was his use of historical context going back to ancient times to give a coherent view of how we got to this point of a medicalized existence. From Ivan's perspective many of us have been conditioned to believe there is something inherently wrong with us that needs fixed. He doesn't promote any specific forms of healing but encourages us to become empowered to regain control of our own power to help one another heal aligning with our human heritage. It's definitely a great read!

 

[CellularIconoclast]

I've had it on my night stand for a while, but haven't read it because thinking about authoritarian medicine makes me too angry to sleep. It's literally killing the people I love in a slow and horrifying manner while claiming to save them. As a scientist, I find it's claim to be scientific especially heinous.

Medicine appears to be politics rather than science. Like most politics it's ostensibly about solving real problems, but those problems are just pawns in a struggle for power. I always thought getting involved in politics was a waste, because the best I could hope for was to cancel out other people's ignorance, but never solve a real problem.

When access to healthy food and effective medicine are restricted by law, simply becoming healthy is itself a disruptive and subversive act.

Perhaps it's more productive to focus on creating something better rather than thinking about how to disestablish medicine. When we create an effective alternative that empowers individuals to understand their own biology, authoritarian medicine will have a very hard time. We can start with our own bodies.

 

[Blossom]

It seems like the best place to start is with ourselves and hopefully that will make an impression on people around us. Culturally we are in deep but I refuse, like you, to dwell on the negatives. Ivan mentioned how medicine turns people into 'defectives' at one point in the book. Originally I was taken aback but when I reflected on it longer it is actually quite true. When people give up all their power and submit to an authority they are often left damaged permanently (physically, mentally and socially). I was well on the road to being defective myself had I not discovered Peat's work. Now I'm just deviant because I don't believe in the system . I'm sure in time it will become more apparent how to transform healing in our culture. Keeping the healing spirit of Peat's work going on the Forum seems like a great start.

 

[fyo]

Like most politics it's ostensibly about solving real problems, but those problems are just pawns in a struggle for power. I always thought getting involved in politics was a waste, because the best I could hope for was to cancel out other people's ignorance, but never solve a real problem.
...
Perhaps it's more productive to focus on creating something better rather than thinking about how to disestablish medicine. When we create an effective alternative that empowers individuals to understand their own biology, authoritarian medicine will have a very hard time. We can start with our own bodies.

I agree.
I see healing (or growth, regeneration) as a significant type of power. If people witness/believe/engage the power of healing, then they'll naturally avoid, or see no use for, the medical establishment. The 'disestablishment' can come from simply a lack of customers, rather than any sort of active process.

I like Ivan's comment about "willingness and competence to engage in self-care.". I think a lot of people feel helpless, whereby, with conditioning, they then turn to the 'experts' for help. In this sense, your other thread on 'Escaping Learned Helplessness' is relevant. Seing successful self-care, or whatever you want to call the care of knowledge/empiricism, is motivating.

 

[4peatssake]

When access to healthy food and effective medicine are restricted by law, simply becoming healthy is itself a disruptive and subversive act.

A powerful and true statement.

Perhaps it's more productive to focus on creating something better rather than thinking about how to disestablish medicine. When we create an effective alternative that empowers individuals to understand their own biology, authoritarian medicine will have a very hard time. We can start with our own bodies.

I think that is both Peat and Ilich's intent. The disestablish of medicine is the result of something better being created.

But to do that is a monumental task that requires enormous energy and effort. Just healing oneself and coming to grips with reality is huge.

Added to that is a huge problem in that the vast majority of the cultural repressed actually fight tooth and nail to keep the beast in place.

Reminds me of the scene from the Matrix of the Woman in the Red Dress.

Peat chose to focus his efforts in the area of nutrition with a specific purpose in mind.

More than 50 years ago, I realized that the US culture had become effectively totalitarian, with decorations, and even the decorations were being fixed by the specialists (the Congress for Cultural Freedom, for example). I went through a series of graduate studies and projects looking for places where reality could influence the culture, rather than being obliterated by it. The academic culture, though, was rapidly changing for the worse. Over a period of a few years I happened to see a few people recover immediately from what doctors had considered incurable problems, using simple and inexpensive methods, and then I realized that some people were willing to discard their old ideas when those conflicted with useful facts, especially when the useful facts could save their life. I started doing evening and weekend classes in nutrition and endocrinology, seeing health as a way to get reality into the culture. My newsletter grew out of the classes, and that led to answering mail, which is cheaper and easier on the internet.

Helping people with physical problems (such as obesity, headaches or joint or nerve pain, or named diseases) and helping people who want to understand something about the world beyond themselves, are structurally similar, but in the issues of health the questions and the potential answers are more clearly present and immediate.

The person who is learning is critically interacting with both nature and culture, with practical issues and theories.

Applying this to practical problems of health and nutrition, a first step is to begin to think about which things are theories or deductions from theories, which are habits, and which things are felt needs or appetites, and to get in the habit of watching processes or things--such as “signs” and “symptoms”--develop through time.

With practice, people can begin to see themselves as functional systems in their main activities, such as eating, and to watch how their needs influence their actions, and what effects different ways of eating have on their other functions, such as sleeping and working. Do appetites govern the timing of meals and the choice of foods? How does the time of day or time of month affect appetites? People often watch for effects of foods, but usually only for a few minutes or hours after eating. Some foods can produce symptoms days after they were eaten, and the activation of the digestive system by a recent meal can cause a reaction to something eaten previously.

Our traditional cultures, and advertising and schools give us definitions and expectations relating to foods and symptoms and physiology, and they teach us to think of our bodies in terms of an “immune system,” “endocrine system,” “digestive system,” “nervous system,” and “circulatory system,” which are mainly anatomical concepts that are more useful to the drug companies than to the consumer of culture. Both conventional and alternative approaches to medicine and health are likely to let those arbitrary ideas of systems cause them to overlook real, but unnamed, processes.

When the organism is seen as a mosaic of parts, rather than as a system of developing fields, medical treatments for one part, such as the “circulatory system,” are likely to cause problems in other “systems,” because the “parts” being treated don't exist as such in the real organism, with the result that the treatments are seldom biologically reasonable.

Besides learning to perceive one's own physiology and becoming aware of the processes of perceiving and knowing so that they can be improved, it's important to seek information to expand the interpretive framework, and to look for new contexts and implications.

Reading with a critical imagination is as important for science as it is for literature or advertising. Good literature often opens expansive new ways of seeing the world, and good science writing can do that too, but too often scientific publications have ulterior motives, and should be read the way advertising propaganda is read.