January 25, 2026
Ever think of your living body like an automobile? You know, the older we get, the more shit starts to fall apart on us, so we sputter on into an expert who is qualified to tell us: “well, if it ain’t the ignition switch, it might be the starter, or could be it’s the battery.” The difference is, most mechanics will eventually find a way of getting to the bottom of it, even if it costs us a pretty penny; and if not, then we’re either going car shopping or we’ll be using our legs a whole lot more.
Our physiological systems are vastly more complicated than a motor vehicle, which is why the average physician earns five times the amount of an auto-mechanic– that and the fact that, unlike an alternator on a ‘97 Buick Skylark, our lives cannot be replaced. Yet, as I age, I’m starting to notice that the way people treat their bodies often does tend to look an awful lot like how we keep our cars going.
Baby Godzilla
I used to think that maintaining one’s health was a matter of eating real food, exercising and keeping our stress low. It has since become clear that this natural and preventative approach is not at all how most stay tuned up; for now it appears as though we drive it however the hell we want- and when things start going haywire, we just take it in.
Last year, my mother threw her back out, only to have the doctors discover she had actually had a heart attack, leading to emergency quintuple bypass surgery– who would have thought that a back injury would be the critical “check engine light” that saved her life? Through her recovery she’s made drastic changes: watching her diet, walking every morning, taking life slow and easy, one day at a time, breathing exercises.
What was initially striking to me, aside from almost losing a parent, is just how avoidable this horrific event would have been if those weren’t drastic changes, but simply the way she had lived every day of her life up until that moment in time. Better late than never, as they say; but sadly, a lot of sick people start living a healthy life only after they’ve almost lost it. Still, others don’t even bother to attempt to reverse decades of self-neglect, and chalk it up as aging.
The medical team who’d been sending her off with countless prescriptions over the past thirty years were shocked when she had massive blockages in every single one of her coronary arteries. With all the tools and education at their disposal, the bloodwork, frequent visits and evaluations, complete with a personalized patient health chart and years of medical records; it seems as though somebody could have seen this one coming.
Ouroboros
Our healthcare system is a wreck: it’s not just the high prescription costs, delayed care, misdiagnoses, low outcomes or that it’s unaffordable, and therefore inaccessible, to millions of people in need; it’s also the fact that our programmed medical approach does not educate patients or hold them accountable for their own proper maintenance.
They’re getting paid to sling drugs and shove cameras up people’s asses, so they don’t really have to address the fact that we’re on a steady diet of Sonic, hot wings and frozen pizza or that we haven’t exercised since P.E. class during our Junior year of high school- maybe we can meet them halfway?
“The doctors have done everything they can do” is typically uttered at the end of the line, when there is nothing else that can be done, leaving what unfolds to be in none other but the hands of you know who. The question then is, “Have we done everything we could do?’; that is, in that entire first section of our life, when we’re supposed to be taking care of ‘it’ (ourselves), have we been doing our part or are we collectively leaning into the healthcare system ever too early in order to prepare ‘it’ for this tragic final act?
I’m not trying to shame patients (we’ve all been one at some point); nor am I specifically blaming doctors (maybe some); I’m merely pointing out the irony in how we’ve commodified basic public medicine, spending billions on researching diseases which are preventable through lifestyle and environmental changes; and are instead studied for the purposes of developing invasive treatments and new pills for profit that may or may not do the trick. I’m curious as to how much of the actual researching budget goes into marketing.
All of this occurs while people with actual unavoidable maladies or emergencies wait their turn in a line clogged by ignorance. This is why many refer to it as a “sick-care” system and why it now appears to be swallowing itself whole.
Do You Validate?
I was catching up with a friend a few weeks ago who had been working for the past 18 months at one of the growing number of Urgent Care clinics just popping up for business in the past few years. It was an entry level position, with a bit of requisite training; but he was psyched about receiving unlimited visits to the clinic, for any sniffle, sneeze, head or heart ache, any time, 24/7. When I asked him (more politely) if it was worth it, he responded “Hell yeah, I got in 26 visits my first year, for free!”.
In a more serious, not-so-distant past, I would have gently probed this statement, concerned for his obvious poor state of health (why else would anyone go see the doctor that often?): “Oh wow, I’m so sorry, what type of treatment have you been undergoing? How are you holding up, are you doing okay?”; but he didn’t look a bit worried, so I ascertained that this was simply the modern-day, dystopian version of currency– plus he was holding up the palm of his hand for a high-five. Here’s to work perks I suppose: Slap!
While there’s nothing wrong with going to the doctor, it feels to me like punching that many free tickets simply because you can, is lacking in intentionality (and may bleat some moral ambiguity as well): like pulling into the Club Carwash, despite the fact that it’s raining, just because we have a membership that gets us unlimited washes (there we go again with the car analogies).
Just because I think FREE anytime Whoppers is not a valid enough reason on its own to work at Burger King, doesn’t mean it’s value-less. So let’s skip way ahead to “why do we feel like we need to see the doctor so often?”. In my mother’s case, she never missed an appointment (and they were frequent), she just assumed her lab-coated pit crew was going to keep the pistons pumping smoothly and optimize her physical potential, on a continuum; but see, they don’t really do that.
Misdiagnosis, and even negligence, occur all the time, particularly when both the patient and the medical professional believe that holistic and homeopathic practices are hocus pocus, while little magic pills and injections are really our only saving grace. It seems as though it’s no longer the doctor’s job to keep tabs on our health, even when we’re regularly checking in with them. It could simply be that our symptoms are acute and are treated accordingly- easy come, easy go.
The problem is: a) Something is always “wrong” (that’s usually on us); and, b) Something to do with the fact that there is always, always a cheap salesperson there, in the waiting room, wheeling behind them a luggage piece full of the answers to all of our medical problems. If only they can get in there to see our doctor before we do– which has me reconsidering why they keep us waiting so long in there.
Reverse Personification
Things (and people) would certainly look a lot different today if everyone were to assume agency over their own personal wellness. The healthcare system could actually function as it should, treating people who don’t have the ability to heal themselves naturally or through changes in their behavior/lifestyle. Perhaps the events of 2020 would have unfolded much more logically; hell, maybe a pandemic wouldn’t even have landed (I can already smell the tar and feathers).
But it did land, as we scrambled to unearth who was to blame and when our dang shots would be ready, sputtering in the drive-thru line at Wendy’s only to curse out the employee handing us our order because their mask was hanging on their chin. “Sorry that my face is the reason you keep getting sick, sir. Here’s your Double Baconator and fries; oh, and don’t forget your frosty”.
This was a frightening period when hospitals were overrun, people were dying and nobody really knew what to do– so we followed orders and stayed indoors, ate buckets of KFC, ala Door Dash, waiting on pins and needles to see when we could drop our kids off at school again; while in the same breath, convincing our bosses that working from home just “feels safer” right now. This became a turning point in modern medicine, where we no longer needed to have any agency over our own health– that became the responsibility of, not only the medical industry, but our schools, coworkers and everyone around us– to a significant degree, this stuck.
This subject is as controversial and cringeworthy as it gets. I have the utmost respect for the surgeons, nurses, physicians and other healthcare professionals who truly do their best in treating the countless number of patients they see week in and week out; but they are clearly operating within a broken system. This is not unlike education in the United States, where teachers are met with their own set of relentless challenges set forth by an inadequate order, as they struggle to imbue a passion for knowledge and learning, in the midst of compliance and rigidity.
They say that when we’re physically with another person often and over an extended period of time, we tend to adopt their mannerisms and facial expressions, to the point where we may even begin to physically resemble the other person. I like to think that we’re feeling and acting like our cars because we spend so much time in them. In that same philosophical vein, do we start to behave and appear more like a couch the more time we spend lounging upon it (in the most boring Transformers movie ever)?; Can we actually start getting more sick because we’re always going to the doctor?
The role of the perpetual patient, to me, is about as exciting as the couch. Perhaps if we were to resist the subconscious temptation of morphing into a fragmented system or an inanimate object and detach from these unnatural forces, we could steer back around to Think for Ourselves Street, near the corner of Logic and Choice. And breathe.