this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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It's a placebo. A glorified massage masquerading as medical treatment. You get a long time in a room with someone playing doctor, they spend on average 6x the amount of time per client than a real doctor. They listen to your concerns, they 'address' them on the spot, no pills, no needles. They spend the entire time making you feel like you are working on the issue(s) together. Many people flock to this nonsense because of how comercialized and de-humanized American medicine has become as an institution.
There is definitely something to be learned about where our medical system falls short. Granted, it falls short first and foremost in terms of being delivered to people who need it, but if we solved that problem the next one we might think about looking at is the percieved impersonality of doctors and the alienating nature of the whole medical system.
Medicine will always be like that under capitalism, because it is true: as a patient, you are a profit vector for the hospital and all the medical suppliers. It is therefore rational to treat patients as so many dollar bills flowing through the campus.
Only when medicine is not a means for profit, but instead a means for humanization itself - for reduction of suffering, either by cure or by palliation - will it be possible for the patient experience to be tolerable. Otherwise it’s about as futile as wishing for capitalist reforms to solve the labor problem in general.
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