In this post, I'll start talking about the global biomedical technocracy
You feel a itching in your throat. Or maybe a sore back. Or a headache. What do you do? I don't know who you are, where you were born nor where you live. And yet, I bet you do exactly one single thing: you go to a doctor.
This is how it goes everywhere in our planet. Or at least in most of our globablized world. And people do it everyday without a secong thought. This is simply astonishing!
Now, as remarkable as this fact is, it is not surprising at all. Think about it: medicine has legal and institutional backup from the law. It requires, after all, a legal license for practice. Medicine has a past, a past that pushes itself onto us in the present, through instutional, social and cultural inertia (here, when I say "inertia" I mean momentum, analogously to the concept in mechanics). It also has a powerful geographical spread, in the form of places for training (medical schools) and for practice (clinics, hospitals, offices, and so on). It even has a powerful social, psychological and cultural spread via all kinds of media: television, movies, seriesbooks and even animes. (Think about it: every now and then, you see a doctor taking a major role in some fictional history you're watching or reading).
You can't really forget about medicine. It's just not possible. You go the gym? There will be a warning in every and each machine asking you to ask for a doctor's permission to work out. You go to a family meeting? There will be someone there talking about some personal affliction, using (of course) some form of medical lingo to describe it. You go to office work? You'll me reminded that the company's doctor will be doing the regular check-ups every now and then. You go the church? Your religious leader will eventually be talking about medical diseases, and even pray them away. You open a book about health? There will be a warning in the first few pages telling you that the book is no substitute for an actual visit to a doctor.
Medicine's reach today, specially in the West, is so powerful and widespread, that you simply can't escape it. It really shouldn't surprise you, then, that you think of going to one of its priests (read: practitioners) as soon as you feel any unwellness, however minor. And don't forget that medicine is sometimes already inside your own home, through the well-known surplus of OTC medications that you save there, just in case.
In other posts, we'll go deeper in the powerful grip medicine has over humanity, and even zoom over some nasty details about how it came to be that ubiquitous.
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