I will never, ever stop thinking about the time one of my students told me "we should hate doctors as much as we hate cops, because a doctor is just a cop for your body."
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in reply to @mammonmachine's post:
thanks aevee now I too will not be able to stop thinking about this
I dunno, I can think of at least one time a doctor helped anyone ever
this is obviously a bs take, but also feels like it may well stem from that student having been failed by a bad doctor and/or inadequate medical system
to me your comment is obviously spoken by someone who has had a very anecdotal experience with the medical system. i don't agree that this take is bullshit, let alone obviously so. and i've personally had a pretty normal time of it
inadequate medical systems are, one may note, often the only kind available.
i meant that saying "doctors are just cops for your body" reads as denying that there are actual illnesses that people need to have treated. like yeah a lot of bad doctors don't take patients' concerns seriously, are fatphobic, or deny patients bodily autonomy, but - even if we were to fix those problems, people will need someone with expertise to put a cast on their broken bones, inspect that lump to see if it's cancer or just inflammation, do things like chemotherapy if it is cancer, etc. etc.
there's a lot wrong with the way doctors are given authority, but there's also real value in expert knowledge of the body, illnesses, and treatments.
whereas cops are just there to be authority, hence why the solution to their problems is just to abolish them outright.
Seconding @widr. When I read about someone saying "doctors are just cops for your body" I immediately, based on my own experience and knowledge, think of someone navigating mental health treatment. Aside from the fact that many doctors will call the cops on you if they don't like your vibes, a lot of mental health treatments have doctors acting solely as gatekeepers. You have to figure out how to act and what to say in order to get them to help you. And if you mess up too badly they will ruin you. Much like literal cops.
this is an awful misreading of a material reality where medicine was used as justification to warehouse disabled people and political dissidents en masse within living memory. in the united states, a staggering amount of doctors believe astonishingly racist horseshit about black people and accordingly subject them to death and maiming. there are doctors still practicing who originate from a time where it was normal to believe queers and brain weird people like you and i should not be permitted to exist or reproduce. the entire way we do medicine is bound up in authority and to deny this is to deny a lot of recent, historical, and ongoing violence
as someone with chronic illnesses that I could at least rule out and narrow down if any doctor agreed to let me do the battery of simple blood tests in the last six years, yeah they're generally cops about your body. Instead I have to go to six specialists who don't believe me enough to test for them. Because I don't know the magic words to describe the debilitating effects I feel right there, in their office.
instead I'm here slowly assembling ebay-surplus pieces to make a blood lab in a sterile box in my workshop while still trying to get people to actually look for anything instead of prescribing me 900mg doses of ibuprofen as if I can't just take 3 pills from the over the counter bottle
and that's not even getting into the fact that none of my trans-care doctors gave me the right dose and I had to look at endocrinology papers and self-experimentation to figure it out (I was given one quarter of the dose required to hit the right blood concentration. for six years.).
I am glad your life is simple enough that you don't deal with this stuff directly. But just like cops are nice to white soccer moms, it doesn't mean doctors as a profession don't act as cops for bodies.
the thing about doctors is the same about cops: the fact that the field has terrible ones at all is damning of the field itself, and the fact that they can deny care based on whims with no consequences is similarly a very direct parallel
It's not exactly reassuring to see someone validate this impression from a completely different angle than my own but it sure is something.
+ 
i'm sorry i'm sorry im sorry i see how i was overlooking experiences unfamiliar to me and oversimplifying things
i need to stop posting Opinions on Important Real Life Issues, i'm increasingly realizing that (a) i don't know much about anything that actually matters and (b) it's never healthy for me to do so, but i've yet to learn to just not post uninformed reactions to these things
i'm sorry, i'll shut up now
Eh, this kind of discussion is valuable I think. Would you have known this if you hadn't posted what you did? Would other people reading this thread?
Edit: Which is to say I appreciate your contribution.
i don't think anyone is mad at you. you read about pancakes and had an eager misread of it as an anti-waffle screed, something we all have some tendency to do.
the point isn't that doctors never help, or that the institution of medicine is somehow as fundamentally illegitimate as that of policing. but doctors are put into similar situations of power over similarly vulnerable people in our systems today, and the inevitable results aren't great to see
lots of people cruise through life with the belief that even the American medical system is totally fine and actually works, which is pretty achievable when you just never need to interact with it. it's pretty common and understandable that you might not have formed this kind of opinion yourself
Doctors do tend to have the same sort of cockiness that cops have that leads them to being wrong about a lot of things, but they do, at least, do an actual necessary role in society. In the ideal world, healthcare would be vastly overhauled to remove the hierarchy of the current system.
coming off thoughts from the other thread: yeah the nominal function of doctors is important and real, far moreso than that of cops, but when it comes time that you really need a cop or a doctor to do that job and help you you're kinda fucked and on your own a large amount of the time.