Prompt: State of Medicine 

A healthy person attracts us because we sense that nothing is wrong with that person. The healthy person is likewise attracted to being around other people. Pale skin and dark circles are not attractive because it suggests that the person has not taken care of themselves. They haven’t slept, or they haven’t been outside, and therefore, they may be susceptible to disease. The sickly-looking person is likewise reluctant to be around other people. They know how they feel, and they know how they look. 

The radiant energy of a healthy person applies both to physical and mental health. Physical problems, like obesity, have psychological causes. Like an addict, the person knows that they’re unhealthy, but they can’t stop. They don’t see a future for themselves, so they don’t take care of their future selves. They aren’t motivated to fix the underlying problems. The consumerist lifestyle promotes addiction by destroying normal relationships. It benefits special interests, but it leads to bad outcomes.

“New professionals” are taught to accept failure as normal. Paid professionals separate consequences from their causes, so self-destructive behavior seems benign. The consequences are considered random, like we caught it from the air. It’s blamed on genetics, like we were faulty from the start, and now we need expensive medical interventions to fix the initial oversight. Our biological instincts are considered part of the initial oversight because sick people are supposedly healthy. We need to take drugs to feel good about ourselves because feeling bad is normal, and looking bad is normal.

Medical interventions should focus on fixing problems beforehand. If plagues are caused by poor sanitation and unhealthy lifestyles, then instead of accepting plagues as normal and trying to mitigate the damage after the fact, the solution is to not have plagues in the first place. Special interests pretend that the human immune system is inherently flawed. It’s not that we have unhealthy living conditions, which would be their fault, it’s evolution’s fault for making our immune system defective. Humans are defective at being human, so the “fixes” require “anti-human” interventions. The reason I drank two milkshakes is because I have the “milkshake gene” that makes me drink two milkshakes.