Photo by Deva Darshan on Unsplash
Yesterday, I went to the osteopath. We start the sessions with her asking what the issue is, after which she focusses on that area of the body.
Although the session was ultimately helpful, I can’t help but feel that there is something a little backward in this. Me, the non-expert, ends up needing to explain my symptoms and what I think is going on with my body.
I think I am particularly bitter this week because of the realisation about how much my chronic bodily tension has affected me up until this point. I actually follow a pretty typical route for a high-masking autistic person, where I held so much tension that went unnoticed for decades by everyone around me. I think it’s why I’ve had so many difficulties in eating, sleeping and weight management.
What frustrates me with modern healthcare is how little focus there is on overall wellbeing. The culture is that you go to the doctor because you have a problem. Once the problem is negligible enough to be ignored, we forget and carry on with our lives. It then slowly gets worse until we need to look for miracle drugs or interventionist surgeries.
For me, this has meant that healthcare becomes an activity of self-advocacy. With the osteopath, I talked about how my body has undergone pretty rigorous changes in the last few weeks – demonstrated by daily photos that I had taken and asked for analysis through AI. I wanted a second pair of eyes to actually confirm whether this was the case.
Her reframing response back to me was that oh, so you’re saying your body changed a bit? I had to reassert the point that my physical shifts have been rather dramatic, not ‘un peu’. These small areas of undermining can be subtle, but they are quietly debilitating.
I had jaw pain come up as a sensory response to the session. When I told her, she did massage it which did help a lot. At the end of the session, I mentioned how teeth grinding is a common autistic trait. Although I can’t expect the professionals to know everything, there was something quite frustrating of having to explain in french something that I only learnt by going to self-organised autistic gatherings.
The verdict from my session was that my system has improved, with better breathing, but some tension still. I got some basic exercises to improve the situation. After that, it was on me. Not a more holistic view that I was hoping for, nor a practical suggestion of when or whether I should come back.
I want to emphasise that my osteopath is clearly skilled and knows what she is doing. She is also generally pleasant and friendly. So this is not about railing against a single professional. Yet the medical care, and overall culture and system towards healthcare leads to these rather unsatisfactory situations where I feel like I am left fending for myself.
When people talk about privilege, I’m not sure they fully understand how widely privilege affects different walks of lives. This isn’t just about being able to be treated better in the judicial system. It also affects how we navigate pretty much every single system in our life.
For example, many neurotypical, white people can go to a dietician or personal trainer that would give advice that broadly work for their body. The chances of me, coming from a racialised and genetic makeup, along with neurodivergent traits would be pretty likely to be failed.
My personal gym plan helped build muscle, but overall caused my health to suffer. It put more stress onto a system that was already chronically braced. I constantly felt like the regime I had was too intense for my body, but I bought into the gym mantra that my personal trainer also implicitly encouraged that this was just about pushing through. Now, in hindsight, it makes sense why the regime didn’t work.
This whole predicament leaves people like me in a difficult situation. On the one hand, we know how the system can inadvertendly harm us through well-intentioned but misguided advice. On the other hand, we also realise that we are not experts in everything, and so we need to be open to getting genuinely valuable support.
The uneasy compromise is to take more of the burden: we research and prepare extensively ahead of getting professional advice.
The challenge is that we cannot put full trust into a professional who may mix genuine scientific knowledge with cultural biases or outdated viewpoints.