Thursday, June 24, 2021

Health and labour: a mini-braindump

A weird thing about the way we talk about health in our society is that the notion of "being healthy" has an intrinsic element of labour to it, in that you aren't seen as "healthy" if you don't work at it.
 
Example: imagine someone who eats whatever they want without regard for nutrition, doesn't engage in any intentional physical activity beyond what occurs naturally in the course of their life, and doesn't see a doctor for preventive medical care.

They'd be seen as unhealthy.
 
Even if their body does whatever they need it to. Even if their numbers are good. People who like to opine on such things would look at their (lack of) regime and go on about how they're unhealthy and need to add weight training and kale smoothies to their routine.
 
We just don't have a paradigm for being considered healthy without working at it.
  
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I just realized as I was writing this that this is what really bugs me about alternative medicine (or, at least, the subset of alternative medicine that reaches me) is that it always calls for more work. You're never done, it's never good enough. 

Even in contexts where I'm not seeking advice. If I mention in passing that, for example, every few years I get strep throat and have to take a course of antibiotics, the alternative medicine aficionados in my vicinity come swooping in recommending additional task (a food to eat, a supplement to take) that they want me to do every single day for the rest of my life to supposedly prevent this horrific fate of having to take a couple of pills a day for a week every few years.

While I don't have any theoretical objection to alternative medicine and do in fact incorporate aspects of it into my life, I simply have less and less room for a paradigm that demands such ceaseless work.

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On a personal level, I'm finding more and more that the labour isn't worth the benefit. Putting in the work that it takes to get optimal health outcomes is like studying 6 hours a day to get an A when, if you didn't study at all, you'd get a B. 
 
It inches my numbers down to just inside the range of what's officially considered healthy, as opposed to their natural state of just outside the range of what's officially considered healthy, but doesn't change a thing about how I feel or function. 
 
Exercise makes me better at exercise, and doesn't change a thing about the activities of daily life. When I started doing yoga 20 years ago, a side plank was torture. Now, it's boring. And it hasn't changed a thing about how I feel or about my ability to do anything other than side planks. It hasn't even improved my physical appearance.

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I've also noticed an awful lot of health labour is kind of . . . consumerist? Buy this, eat this, just a dollar a day to solve a problem you can't even perceive!

And there's also this sense that keeping yourself healthy is some kind of . . . responsibility to society, maybe? I'm not really sure how to articulate this part. But I get this vibe from the way some people talk, that if you aren't seen to be doing the labour, and if you aren't seen to be engaging in the "correct" consumption patterns, it's like you aren't doing your duty as a citizen.

I don't think that's, well, healthy.
 
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It would also be interesting to study how the labour of health has evolved over time (and, probably, varied by society). I can't immediately point to any data, but I feel like the expected labour has increased as my life has gone on. 

In the time before nutrition labels, people couldn't possibly have been expected to monitor their nutrition in such minute detail. In the time before gyms, people couldn't possibly have been expected to engage in weight training.

There was a time when it was socially unacceptable for women to be seen engaging in athletic activities. There was a time when it would have been socially unacceptable for anyone, of any gender, to jog down the street.

(There have also been many other times when many other combinations of activities were socially acceptable or unacceptable in historical cultures I'm unfamiliar with.)

People for whom food is scarce eat what's available. If you've always lived in this kind of context, the idea of deliberately limiting your caloric intake would be laughable.

People for whom life requires constant physical labour would find the idea of doing additional exercise to meet a standard of fitness that never comes up in real life laughable. 

I wonder if there has ever been a time and place in history were people were expected to do more health-related labour (on top of the labour of simply staying alive) than they are now?

2 comments:

laura k said...

Fantastic post! This really resonates with me.

Health labour being consumerist and the concept of never being done align perfectly. I stopped reading specific "wellness" news exactly for this reason. The recommendations exist for their own sake. Why do I need to take this? What will it do for me? What is the problem I'm trying to resolve or correct? If I can't answer these questions in a specific, concrete way, it's just another thing to buy.

Most people do need to engage in some kind of health labour as they age, if they want to maintain a certain level of health and independence. This is a huge reason that poverty is the biggest social determinant of health, because that health labour is tied to our privilege. But sorting out what is needed to keep us on track and what is useless (for everything except the alternative-health industry) is the key, IMO. And the answer is seldom entirely clear.

laura k said...

I will share one bit that I learned painfully, which of course may not apply to you.

I also found that the labour required to get my numbers to move a tiny smidgen was not worth it. It felt totally counterproductive, and had negative impacts on my happiness and mental health. I pulled back from much of the health labour. And gradually my numbers got worse and my general physical health began to decline. It turned out the effort that I thought was doing nothing actually had been having an impact. It was preventing things from getting worse.

This was only apparent to me over a long period of time. But honestly, I don't regret dialing back on the health labour, even though it led to greater labour later. I just couldn't stand the health maintenance using up so much of my time and mental bandwidth.