Is there a Sin Tax in Medical Care?

Thesis: People who smoke, drink, or are overweight get poorer medical care because doctors simply diagnose the cessation of these "sins" rather than looking in depth to the cause of the problem, which may/may not be the sin itself.

I'm not saying that the abovementioned don't increase the chances of health problems, but I'm saying that (1) they don't always, (2) the medical field inflates them and (3) may possibly be drawing false conclusions about their risk in your medical diagnosis.

On a trip I took in 2005, I got a back injury while on a crazily forceful amusement park ride that, I think, gave me some kind of whiplash. Direcly after I got off the ride, I had the first back spasm of my life in the bathroom of a restaurant near the ride. Even though it really fucking hurt I didn't think anything much of it because it was short. Following the accident, I had back stiffness, but a year later, I woke up one day and had another back spasm (just like the one after the ride, but this time it didn't go away). Even moving my arms sent elecrifying pain all throughout my body. I had back spasms for about 7 days and they slowly subsided until I was able to walk again 9 days after the initial one. Since then, I've had pretty much no respite from some level of back pain.

My chart:
Age: 27
Sex: Female
Height: 5'7''
Weight: 230 pounds (mostly in breasts ;))
Smoke? No
Drink? No
Drug Use? No
High Blood Pressure? No
Food Allergies? No
Drug Allergies? No
Notes: Gets no less sleep than a narcoleptic grandmother, doesn't have a stressful job, no children, higher than average resistance to infection, eat no processed food, and was born into a family where everyone's fat.

When I go to the doctor about my back pain all they recommend is that I lose weight. And despite my re-telling of the injurious ride, the diagnosis doesn't change. On a recent visit to a Kaiser doctor in San Francisco - where I made an appointment to discuss preventive pain care for my back - she said she couldn't help me until a further injury had happened, but the best way to prevent it was to lose weight, and then handed me a dietician recommendation. If the weight didn't cause the pain in the first place, then why do I always get the same answer?

Despite my having discussed my back problem with 3 doctors, the only person who has even recommended an X-ray has been my chiropractor. She's great, and says she doesn't care how big I am as long as I follow her directions on back care.

Testing my theory, I've asked some sinful friends about their experience with the medical system. Just last night I had dinner with a fellow big-boned femme who'd been forced to take multiple gestational diabetes tests during her pregnancy despite having no symptoms of the illness and having had negative results on previous screenings. When, in fact, doctors don't know exactly what causes gestational diabetes, couldn't her time at the doctor be more effectively used? Read about G.D. here.

I have a few other stories, but I encourage you to do a bit of asking yourself. Maybe you have an experience where you felt your actual condition was overlooked because of other habits. And I recommend you call your doctor out on it. I definitely will the next time it happens.

A is for abortion

You know those pictures that anti-choice people hold up at rallies.. you know, the ones that have pictures of mashed up fetuses next to a quarter or a bunch of limb nubs neatly arranged on some kind of tray. I always wonder about the person who does the arranging. I mean, who is the person who takes these photos? Does that guy get paid or does he just do it for love of the movement? Who gives them these fetuses? Is the guy behind the camera advising him to move this little leg to the left a little so it can be in frame? And do they go to, like, Kinko's to enlarge these photos?

Dunno if you heard, but a famous "baby executioner," Dr. George Tiller, was recently shot and killed while he was - get this - at church, by someone who probably - get this - thought God told him to do it. God, get your story straight. Tiller was known for providing late-term abortions in Wichita, Kansas. He even had a website, which is currently offline with a message asking us to respect their privacy.

The anti-choice people are smugly spinning this as a chicken's-come-home-to-roost story, saying (without saying) that he was finally executed the way that he'd executed all those poor little babies. The word execution brings to mind images of little tiny babies getting guillotined, which - I'm pretty sure - isn't what happened.

But a zygote isn't a baby. A blastocyst isn't a baby. A fetus isn't a baby. But I don't even want to talk about what obstetrics and gynecology tell us, I want to talk about the fact that the moment a baby comes into the world, the same people who were decrying its rights, now believe that it should be subject to the country they've created: a country where that child could someday be sentenced to the death penalty (especially if that child is brown and poor - and if the child is a he and is unfortunate enough to be poor and brown, then there's a better chance he'll end up in prison than in college). That child will be born into a country whose politicians advocate for deforestation, a country that hosts hundreds of Congress people who will consider the child a leech if it requires any kind of public assistance, whose mother could be in debt for 10 years if there are complications at birth, whose mother will be given no pay for her time-off taken to have the child, and where that child - if he becomes homeless - will be given work applications (not shiny pennies or t-shirts that say "Thank God You Weren't Aborted") by Christians driving past his cardcoard house on their way to church. (No, by the way the work apps was not an exaggeration. I remember the congregants of my own childhood church bragging about how they gave homeless people work applications.)

It seems to me that the moment you're out the pussy, the people who cared enough about your little baby soul to kill doctors are eager for you to grow the fuck up in our nation under God shaped by nut-bag Republicans.

Bah! Damn fetus lovers. You can't say that life is sacred and put more people in prison than any other country in the world, you idiots. And you can't say you love babies when you clearly are the ones behind the creepy fetus limb picture-taking, you sick fucks.