Still Hydrophobic

It will probably take awhile to get any further tests done due to low funds, and the insane bureaucracy of everything medical.  But what do you expect?   People have been treating doctors like priests for a long time.  "Give it to me straight, Doc, how long have I got?"  If I were a doctor I might say, "Three seconds" and toss the patient out the window.

Seriously, Doc does not know how long you'll live unless you're obviously taking your final breaths.  Why you bother at that point, who knows.  But the medical profession did not have a stable enough collective ego not to feed this impression of God-like knowledge and vision of the future.

Just like lawyers, they make it a point to create  language of their own, heavily steeped in Latin, with touches of sanskrit thrown in in the form of take home flyers about your unknown, incurable, highly expensive disease.   If they can't fix it, they'll just pretend you only have symptoms they understand.

Since doctors know all, you convince yourself you are crazy, and try to avoid any situation which will shine a light on your difficulty.  You hide with your trouble accepting the less than helpful diagnosis and pills offered by your Doctor/Priest.

For awhile there, beginning in the 70's and maybe earlier, healthcare and diseases became the fastest growing hobby in America.  People loved comparing their batteries of hourly and daily pills.  They loved the regular visits, the attention, the delicious morbidity of their defects.   Pretty exciting stuff.  And something to provide extra structure, and for some, a regular day off of work.  Or maybe full enough disability.  No work, but time to go boating or hiking or drinking all day.

Healthcare hobbyists.  They thrive on the experience.  I can see that.  No one has better drugs than the healthcare industry.  And you ether go through them to get it or they throw you in jail if you go to the unregulated marketplace.

"Doctors orders".   Really?  Come here doll, I'm a Doctor and I have an order or two you need to obey.

My conclusion is that people are incredibly gullible and scared to death of looking stupid.  So when the Doctor says you have aquibaillesiuatrababolitis conundrum and must pay big money regularly to monitor the condition, but we can't actually cure it, and you are to only drink liquids from the left side of glass containers from now on, by golly you do it.

Your kid is not a brat.  Your child is addhd, ocd, dls, rtc, etc.  And most likely asthmatic, and suffering from ptsd due to a difficult birth.  Obviously some people legitimately experience these conditions, but there is far more money in it if we diagnose based on loose subjective, unmeasurable, anecdotal criteria to broaden the market.  We can now sell our drugs and services to 20% or so, rather than the 1% or 2% that scientific tests and diagnosis would provide.

It is a win win win.  We get business, your child becomes more manageable through chemistry, and you have something other than yourself or your child's obnoxivity to blame.  The schools are happy because now your kid conforms to their aberrant one-size-fits-all authoritarian propaganda palace.
Everyone is happy.  Sort of.

Lately being angrily down on religion, other than islam, is a highly popular thing.  But the medical and political worlds get a pass.  If you look at it objectively you will see that a lot of people aspire to priesthood and a metaphysical sense of infallibility.   The medical profession, science paid for through taxes and controlled by Big Brother.  You can eliminate ever church, synagogue and other place of worship, and you will find there is not shortage of priests.  They just opt for another title.  A rose by any other name...

So, I guess we are doomed.  And I may never get any tests done and I will go out with a bang to escape the phobia with which I've been plagued.   But only if my own cures do not work.  I will fix it myself, but I'll be using pills in the process.   I'm as good at trouble shooting as the doctor/priests.  I can use their info and do a better job at solving the problem.

But they do have info I do not have.  I'm just better at working it down.  You can know everything and still be a horrible troubleshooter or problem solver. It is the rule rather than the exception.  That is why things are as they are. We are intimidated and rightly impressed with those who know lots of complicated stuff.  Where it goes wrong is that we assume such knowledge equates to doing the right thing, and knowing how to best use the information.  Mostly it doesn't work like that.

You'd think people would know this.  Especially in academia, yet they are the worst for letting egos override truth and true constructive progress.  A lot of information, experience, and knowledge is there. Ability to put it to best use is not a popular skill.  Ability to obtain government funding and agenda driven grants is very popular, and a skill which has been honed to a fine art over the years.  The driving force in academia is to maintain their egos, and include themselves among the priests who take your money because they are super natural.

This is not to say that higher education isn't great, that few people grasp the real math behind science or much else, and that many great things have been developed and discovered in such institutions.  But it is almost by accident and the majority of what is done and taught is for the purpose of control and maintaining the security and social status of those who manage to spend their lives there.  If I had it to do over, I would very likely secure myself in that insulated existence and enjoy messing with the minds of students and faculty alike.

Depression without any real good reason is bad.  Depression with plenty of identifiable reason may be worse.

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