#Anarchist medicine

[evildilf2]

Where tf does the idea that anarchists want unregulated medicine even come from 😭😭 everytime I see posts that are like “guys… we will need doctors who know what they’re doing & insulin after da revolution…” all I can really say is no shit??

[nando161mando]

a guide to practicing first aid in the streets from Riot Medicine. an excellent reference manual to bookmark.

[jvzebel-x]

🦋

[featureenvyproductions]

dude why do I have to participate in capitalism I wanna live in a cabin wrought by my own hands and draw some fucking pictures and trade my friends furniture and handyman tasks for vegetables and eggs or some shit

[13thpythagoras]

yeah half of my blog is DIY healthcare because I can technically afford the monthly premiums but what am I getting? It's basically appendicitis / accident insurance, there's not much other value I see in western medicine. And if I do get appendicitis I'm headed to the Good Sam to plead a charity case, and if I get stuck with $80 k debt for appendicitis I'll just have to fight it. Paying the copays would probably be $20k anyway and premiums over the years, another $30k so what's a last $30k to bet I'll never need any of that bs?... I mean in Cuba they do this procedure for hundreds. I could fly NetJets to Mexico (and perhaps Mexico to Cuba) and get it done in either of those countries for a zero off the USA's cash price tag, but air ambulance Netjet with me inside dying of appendicitis doesn't sound too wise so medical tourism is still likely best left for preventative / elective procedures. (can I preventatively get my appendix removed lol)

But we have remedies to diseases capitalism can't crack because our remedies aren't constrained by the need to make a fascist-level-of-profit / monopolizer's-patent for big pharma.

Can we also unpack how Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine for free and gave it away? Can we unpack the incentives for innovation at work there?

Why was Salk driven to innovate while going total George Washington mode on the victory lap, giving away his fascist prize to the public in exchange for immortality as a truly magnanimous man of the people.

Could it be?

More than just money incentivizes human beings to innovate in medicine?

Could it be, that perhaps more than money drives human action towards saving each other's very lives?

I definitely can't say this for a hospital, or a pharma corp, but I would cross the road to save your life. I would try, I would take a risk to do that, I wouldn't stick my hand out for a $100k of oncology bills like the hospital would, or they tell you to "i dunno i guess just go die of cancer ya brokeass" is what western medicine says. Even if you pay those bills, they won't cure you; you still hear from your provider who wears a pink ribbon "cancer is an incurable disease."

Then what are you researching? lmao

If western medicine is religiously committed to the idea that cancer is un-curable, why the pink ribbons?

Why flood the "awareness channels" with "awareness PSAs" for the most-well known disease on the planet? Could they possibly be doing that to hide something from the public / Google results?

Why do we spend a trillion a year on research for something for which we're religiously opposed to there being a cure?

Nothing adds up until you accept the truth seen by Rick Simpson et al, that western medicine can cure cancer easily they just can't patent that cure. That's the real problem, they can't MONOPOLIZE the many cures to cancer; they cannot control that capital as fascists so they deny that it could even exist as a possibility. Holy gaslights Batman!

[how the critics sound]No! Big⛽️💡 pharma billionaires would never ever ⛽️💡gaslight us! No! no ⛽️💡no no ⛽️💡no ⛽️💡no ⛽️💡no! I had a very charismatic chemistry professor in college and he said cancer has no cure and I believed him, he was so handsome! Science is never wrooooong raaaaaaaaaaa!!!!! I refuse to believe ⛽️💡Pfizer ⛽️💡would ever choose profit over saving lives! [/how the critics sound]

[headspace-hotel]

What i've been learning thru my research is that Lawn Culture and laws against "weeds" in America are deeply connected to anxieties about "undesirable" people.

I read this essay called "Controlling the Weed Nuisance in Turn-of-the-century American Cities" by Zachary J. S. Falck and it discusses how the late 1800's and early 1900's created ideal habitats for weeds with urban expansion, railroads, the colonization of more territory, and the like.

Around this time, laws requiring the destruction of "weeds" were passed in many American cities. These weedy plants were viewed as "filth" and literally disease-causing—in the 1880's in St. Louis, a newspaper reported that weeds infected school children with typhoid, diphtheria, and scarlet fever.

Weeds were also seen as "conducive to immorality" by promoting the presence of "tramps and idlers." People thought wild growing plants would "shelter" threatening criminals. Weeds were heavily associated with poverty and immortality. Panic about them spiked strongly after malaria and typhoid outbreaks.

To make things even wilder, one of the main weeds the legal turmoil and public anxiety centered upon was actually the sunflower. Milkweed was also a major "undesirable" weed and a major target of laws mandating the destruction of weeds.

The major explosion in weed-control law being put forth and enforced happened around 1905-1910. And I formed a hypothesis—I had this abrupt remembrance of something I studied in a history class in college. I thought to myself, I bet this coincides with a major wave of immigration to the USA.

Bingo. 1907 was the peak of European immigration. We must keep in mind that these people were not "white" in the exact way that is recognized today. From what I remember from my history classes, Eastern European people were very much feared as criminals and potential communists. Wikipedia elaborates that the Immigration Act of 1924 was meant to restrict Jewish, Slavic, and Italian people from entering the country, and that the major wave of immigration among them began in the 1890s. Almost perfectly coinciding with the "weed nuisance" panic. (The Immigration Act of 1917 also banned intellectually disabled people, gay people, anarchists, and people from Asia, except for Chinese people...who were only excluded because they were already banned since 1880.)

From this evidence, I would guess that our aesthetics and views about "weeds" emerged from the convergence of two things:

First, we were obliterating native ecosystems by colonizing them and violently displacing their caretakers, then running roughshod over them with poorly informed agricultural and horticultural techniques, as well as constructing lots of cities and railroads, creating the ideal circumstances for weeds.

Second, lots of immigrants were entering the country, and xenophobia and racism lent itself to fears of "criminals" "tramps" and other "undesirable" people, leading to a desire to forcefully impose order and push out the "Other." I am not inventing a connection—undesirable people and undesirable weeds were frequently compared in these times.

And this was at the very beginnings of the eugenics movement, wherein supposedly "inferior" and poor or racialized people were described in a manner much the same as "weeds," particularly supposedly "breeding" much faster than other people.

There is another connection that the essay doesn't bring up, but that is very clear to me. Weeds are in fact plants of the poor and of immigrants, because they are often medicinal and food plants for people on the margins, hanging out around human habitation like semi-domesticated cats around granaries in the ancient Near East.

My Appalachian ancestors ate pokeweed, Phytolacca americana. The plant is toxic, but poor people in the South would gather the plant's young leaves and boil them three times to get the poison out, then eat them as "poke salad." Pokeweed is a weed that grows readily on roadsides and in vacant lots.

In some parts of the world, it is grown as an ornamental plant for its huge, tropical-looking leaves and magenta stems. But my mom hates the stuff. "Cut that down," she says, "it makes us look like rednecks."

[joywizard]

i see so many posts online that make me go "well. something tells me anarchists generally dont actually believe that"

[kunosoura]

leninists are right about anarchists not having a good model for pharmaceutical production but the thing is neither do they. no one repeat no one has reckoned with what a sustainable model of medicine using modern technology without extractivist ideology and environmentally harmful global supply chains might look like. and the fact that the best options put forward are either a Hail Mary faith in communism being able to Just Fix the sustainability and ethical problems of modern pharmaceuticals or a worrying disregard for what a sudden decentralization of production and economic organization looks like keeps me up some nights

[anarchoherbalism]

Rechosting this rant from like a month ago here

Something that bugs me is that autonomous health & medical experimentation is widely accepted and celebrated--only when it succeeds *and is accepted by the wider establishment (usually bc it makes money and doesnt drastically contradict establishment ethos and/or profit.) Laypeople who become experts out of desperation or love or passion or whatever reasons and have a celebrated breakthrough in medicine are lauded only once they transcend into honorary members of the Medical Professional Class. I've seen people freak out at the idea of bathtub insulin and go on to talk about how openinsulin is doing it the "right way" when like. Buddy? Hon? The thing you're scared of resulting in nebulously dangerous medicine is their goal, it just looks different when they say it because they know what they're talking about and they have a nice website. The trans women making huge strides in DIY HRT are carrying on the legacy of the women who INVENTED HRT, you're just terrified of them because the people of the past have either been erased by the licensed docs that stole their work uncredited for personal glory or, or those women have retroactively been lifted to Honorary Professional Status. You're applying the same transphobia and transmisogyny and classism to the people in front of you that their foremothers faced. We gotta shoot the medical licensing boards in our heads and focus on building working knowledge because the bum (affectionate) on ur Street corner can DEFINITELY know more than many doctors. Our culture recognizes this in all kinds of places, like the relatively widespread recognition that disabled people need to be experts in our own care because the docs sure as shit usually ain't, but then when it's all put together into a real, useful praxis it gets screamed down because of all of these oppression structures and brainworms and learned helplessness; not to mention all of yall that go around beefing theory about medication production with 0 even beginner-level knowledge of how these things work or what real risks are involved or what the mitigation strategies currently in place look like.

[txttletale]

I'm sorry if this sounds like a bait question, but can you explain to me why some people who (correctly imo) make fun of anarchist DIY medicine also promote DIY HRT? My current assumption is that either they're being inconsistent or DIY HRT really does refers to something different from like bathtub insulin but I'm not familiar with it so idk

there's no inconsistency there -- people making fun on bathtub insulin posting aren't ridiculing the concept of 'going outside official channels to acquire medication', they're ridiculing people who think we should abandon the concept of mass production of medication altogether

[mesetacadre]

What does drive me a little crazy is how unashamedly individualist anarchism is, and how none of them seem to care or notice. Every political argument, conclusion and solution is derived from the individual. There is no concern for the interests of a collective of people, what matters is that you as a person are very special, important, and every single one of your beliefs should always be considered in every situation.

q. How will medicine work?

a. Well I knew a guy who once fixed a dislocated shoulder without any specialized equipment, so something like that

q. How will production work?

a. The people who know what to make will produce it if they want to

q. What if there are people who can't access something vital?

a. That won't be a problem. I have a friend who knows how to improvise crutches. And another who can plant food in a roof garden. So we'll make do

There is no real consideration for other people in all the "solutions" proposed by anarchists. All they care about is their own absolute freedom, of putting their own interests above that of everyone else, of their own platonic ideals of authority. Some anarchists even brag about the fact that they have no end goal, as if it was something positive. They claim "continuous action", as if anything could ever be positively changed without long term plans and only good intentions

[argyrocratie]

"How will people get healthcare?

(...)

During the Spanish Civil War, Barcelona’s Medical Syndicate, organized largely by anarchists, managed 18 hospitals (6 of which it had created), 17 sanatoria, 22 clinics, 6 psychiatric establishments, 3 nurseries, and one maternity hospital. Outpatient departments were set up in all the principal localities in Catalunya. Upon receiving a request, the Syndicate sent doctors to places in need. The doctor would have to give good reason for refusing the post, “for it was considered that medicine was at the service of the community, and not the other way round.”[40] Funds for outpatient clinics came from contributions from local municipalities. The anarchist Health Workers’ Union included 8,000 health workers, 1,020 of them doctors, and also 3,206 nurses, 133 dentists, 330 midwives, and 153 herbalists. The Union operated 36 health centers distributed throughout Catalunya to provide healthcare to everyone in the entire region. There was a central syndicate in each of nine zones, and in Barcelona a Control Committee composed of one delegate from each section met once a week to deal with common problems and implement a common plan. Every department was autonomous in its own sphere, but not isolated, as they supported one another. Beyond Catalunya, healthcare was provided for free in agrarian collectives throughout Aragon and the Levant.

Even in the nascent anarchist movement in the US today, anarchists are taking steps to learn about and provide healthcare. In some communities anarchists are learning alternative medicine and providing it for their communities. And at major protests, given the likelihood of police violence, anarchists organize networks of volunteer medics who set up first aid stations and organize roving medics to provide first aid for thousands of demonstrators. These medics, often self-trained, treat injuries from pepper spray, tear gas, clubs, tasers, rubber bullets, police horses, and more, as well as shock and trauma. The Boston Area Liberation Medic Squad (BALM Squad) is an example of a medic group that organizes on a permanent basis. Formed in 2001, they travel to major protests in other cities as well, and hold trainings for emergency first aid. They run a website, share information, and link to other initiatives, such as the Common Ground clinic described below. They are non-hierarchical and use consensus decision-making, as does the Bay Area Radical Health Collective, a similar group on the West Coast.

Between protests, a number of radical feminist groups throughout the US and Canada have formed Women’s Health Collectives, to address the needs of women. Some of these collectives teach female anatomy in empowering, positive ways, showing women how to give themselves gynecological exams, how to experience menstruation comfortably, and how to practice safe methods of birth control. The patriarchal Western medical establishment is generally ignorant of women’s health to the point of being degrading and harmful. An anti-establishment, do-it-yourself approach allows marginalized people to subvert a neglectful system by organizing to meet their own needs.

After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, activist street medics joined a former Black Panther in setting up the Common Ground clinic in one of the neediest neighborhoods. They were soon assisted by hundreds of anarchists and other volunteers from across the country, mostly without experience. Funded by donations and run by volunteers, the Common Ground clinic provided treatment to tens of thousands of people.

The failure of the government’s “Emergency Management” experts during the crisis is widely recognized. But Common Ground was so well organized it also out-performed the Red Cross, despite the latter having a great deal more experience and resources.[41] In the process, they popularized the concept of mutual aid and made plain the failure of the government. At the time of this writing Common Ground has 40 full-time organizers and is pursuing health in a much broader sense, also making community gardens and fighting for housing rights so that those evicted by the storm will not be prevented from coming home by the gentrification plans of the government. They have helped gut and rebuild many houses in the poorest neighborhoods, which authorities wanted to bulldoze in order to win more living space for rich white people."

-Peter Gelderloos, "Anarchy Works" (2010)

[rennybu]

AAAAUHG.. so many things come to mind so i will start with... i like to imagine he and Fenris are the same height :') (5'11"). This got a bit long but i'm always happy to talk about this guy!!!!!!!!! @trebuchet151

he's got a big garnet signet ring with the Amell family crest carved in it, and that's about the only recognizable thing that denotes his lineage... he has always liked stamping wax seals on letters with it!!! he's a ring guy generally, he likes mixing and matching stones and metal.

his hands are very scarred and rough from reckless casting, and especially casting fire magic without a staff (in a pinch).

He has a heart tattooed on his ring finger for Fenris :') their wedding was very. Andraste as the witness, on the road, impulsive. Vows for themselves, nothing legally binding. Fenris has a plain gold band on a red cord somewhere on his person at all times.

his testosterone is taken via oral tincture, some kind of oil solution he takes drops of daily. like a mild and highly personalized potion recipe! it's the only reason he sometimes needs a home base or shop to set up in, to prepare a big batch. He stores it in little glass vials he collects from trinket shops. Malcolm found the recipe for him after he came out in his tweens.

Bethany is kind of sainted in his mind, when he's exasperated or stunned he might utter an "oh Bethany" (in the tone of "are you seeing this shit") rather than an "oh Maker"

He struggles a lot with empathy, in that he frequently can logically recognize when he should feel for another person's situation, and yet finds himself unmoved. He will deliberately go out of his way to care for others, sometimes more than is needed, to try to make up for what he perceives as a personal flaw. This is how he ended up like a wrung out mouldy rag, emotionally, by the end of DA2.

His spell class is fucking terrifying, he has a lot of mana and not much hp, but is really reckless about his reserves. He combines force magic with fire magic, trapping foes and incinerating them, and sometimes leaving himself winded in the wake of too much magical exertion at once.

he's pretty spry and strong but doesn't have a great constitution. He tires out quickly in fights, hence trying to end them explosively and quickly.

Was briefly stalked by a sloth demon, perhaps around Act 2, and passed a very "get off my doorstep" homebrew harrowing as a result. Burnt it out of his shadow and got some spring back in his step, around roughly the same time he recognized his feelings for Fenris, settled into his role as Hawke within Kirkwall, etc. He Killed Dysphoria, Forever!!!

His love for Merrill makes him very "blood magic is okay", he loves her worldview and wisdom about its use, but his upbringing prevents him from extending that grace to himself. He was forced to use blood magic in his duel against the Arishok in order to survive it!!! Angst. Hates himself quite badly for this. Until Merrill is like "why are you special" and he's like ooohh. I get it

We all kno Hawke goes thru hell but I love reflecting on Orson's arc from early family life to Now/post-DA:I, he found closure among his friends and family and was able to fully remove himself from a public leadership role and is doing much better for it. He's a bit of an anarchist i guess, jack of all trades with a pretty rigid set of personal morals that sometimes forces him to act outside the law. He's very grey market, hard to contact, arrive in the nick of time.

He and Fenris do not ever shut up around each other. Two dudes who talk about fuck all, very intelligently. If you see Fenris in the wild, Orson is probably around, too. They love hunting Venatori and only sometimes get in the way of other spy/subterfuge activities.

he smells like BRITTLE sun-baked wood, with a hint of oily herbal medicine.

[literallynathandrake]

So She Lost

The 2024 election and how to make things better

We did our best folks, we voted. We canvassed and phone banked and fundraised and bullied the president into dropping out of the race. But we lost. We cannot change that, and the sooner you accept that then sooner you can begin to feel better.

Take a week, a month, till the inauguration, however long to come to terms with what happened. You're feeling grief and grief takes time to process.

But a lost election does not mean you will die.

Your life, if I had to guess, will become materially worse. If you're queer and in a red state start saving up. If you're trans get those name and gender changes in. If you're undocumented, or related to someone undocumented, get your shit gathered.

I can't guide you through everything but I can tell you now that your life is not over, and even if it will suck absolute shit, it will get better over time. You'll graduate, get a promotion, find a partner (or find some garlic bread if you're not into the whole relationship thing), see friends, watch movies, read books, watch a sunset. There will still be good things, and it is important that we appreciate these good things especially when things start to suck.

We can't make any calls on how bad the next four years will be but I can say this, fascist governments can't last forever. They're a fire that gets lit and burns itself out. Some fires are big and destroy a lot of things, sometimes they can be contained, sometimes they burn longer than you'd like.

But they do burn out, especially when people contain it and help control it.

Find local organizations that advocate for the one thing you care most about. Trans rights, abortion, Gaza, homelessness. Go to join them, work with them, and recruit for them.

If you can't find these orgs, get a friend and do it yourself. If you can't find a friend, make one. Do not ever think you are helpless, you are a member of your community and with enough work you can work to change it. Even if no one listens to you, you are there making a statement and that means that you are not silent.

As online as I am I think I'm going to wane off it. It does nothing for me, outside of wasting my time and laugh at funny jpegs. It's important that we remember that the Internet is not real life, as much as it may seem.

Also, and I don't care if you're an anarchist, socialist, communist, third worldist, neo-Trotskyite. You're a bleeding heart liberal now. Keep your social positions, but leftism can't get done now. You love Joe Biden, you loved Hillary, you were ok with Bernie. Work within this framework until it becomes politically viable to do anything else.

Sleep, we all need it, and drink water. Take your medicine if you have any. Maybe go for a walk in the morning. You're not screwed yet, make the most of it

[permian-tropos]

that is a fair argument—perish the thought of having poor quality control or lax adherence to safety standards! however long it takes to train people to do this work safely, they must be trained. we can abide by real world standards of safety and training for this

but a reminder: in this hypothetical we are imagining dealing with a need in a society that already exists. imagine you were born into this society

if your solution to the problem is “found a state” or “establish capitalism” we likely can’t do that on such short notice, but otherwise, how would you @beesandwasps like to work in this scenario as a safety advocate?

I’m not demanding that you agree that this hypothetical society is the best society, I just want to know what you would choose to do if you lived under these circumstances

I assume a lot of people are going to bring up safety concerns—which indicates a will to work on that issue, yes? will you all be training yourself in the quality inspection field?

twitter has been going on for a while about how an anarchist society can’t produce insulin so instead of deferring the question or coming up with my own answer, I feel the most anarchist solution is to collectively discuss it

let’s say you live in a society of autonomous worker collectives, some regional and some diffusely spread throughout the anarcho-realm. one of them is a federation of medical supply distributors and they have determined there’s a shortage of insulin. they have crunched the numbers and they recommend a couple thousand people from your region go work at the nearest insulin factory for 15 hours a week (nobody works more than that because fuck that lol)

labor cannot be coerced in this society so here is the question—what, outside of a wage or violence, could motivate you to willingly go work there?

important to note—you will be provided for as well as anyone else in your society whether you do or don’t go

[grison-in-space]

It's never too late. We are beginning to think about how and why we exploit animals, and how it is not morally consistent with our values; several prominent anarchists and communist bloggers on Tumblr have admitted that veganism is ethically and financially superior on every level, though they don't participate in it, which is sad. All it takes is a little extra work. The collapse of capitalism will also bring the collapse of the animal industry, or vice versa. The meat plants subjugate both humans and animals, causing persistent trauma- in fact, it has the highest rate of trauma among every category of labor. If you support abolition, you should support all abolition: children, psych people, and animals. On a site like Tumblr, we have an opportunity to promote the breakdown of all positions of power. We are all equal.

Honey, you have the wrong fucking blog to the extent that I can only assume you are spamming this message to everyone you think might listen. I have gone on the record several times to say:

I am a pragmatic empiricist. I care much less about ideological consistency than I do about observed outcomes. There are traps there, too—sometimes people get too much into the weeds about observing proxies for desired goals—but essentially I do think that careful observation of the world around me is much more valuable than starting with a consistent ideology and assuming that good intentions will yield good outcomes.

I am motivated by animal welfare. For me, part of that involves meeting animals on their own level, using their own species-specific signals to assess stress and comfort, and understanding animals within their own social context. Therefore,

I am opposed to animal rights narratives that encourage people to project their own imagined emotional responses onto animals without assessing the animals' actual signals in context. Additionally,

I believe as a behavioral ecologist that, for good and for ill, humans are essentially animals participating in a broader ecosystem that includes us. I do not think humans are special or exist outside that broader web, and I think that ecological intervention works most effectively when we see ourselves as part of nature rather than as some kind of twisted unnatural personification of original sin. Conflict and death are part of life. You won't make a better world by pretending otherwise.

I am a disabled person ("psych people?!"), and more specifically an autistic and neurodivergent person. I literally spelled out for you last night that I have difficulties eating and that imposing more barriers to that ("a little extra work") is a significant burden for me. Your easy dismissal of this point is, in context, amazingly and blithely ableist. Wow.

"psych people?!" I am happy to critique coercive psychiatry and medicine more generally, but that one's new on me. If you're not brave enough to use the language of mad/crip pride, are you entirely sure you understand the points of the dialogue? Your demonstrated grasp of disability justice is already extremely poor; this ain't helping.

I am not anti-state (i.e. I am not an anarchist; I am a democratic socialist) and I routinely criticize daydreams about burning entire systems to the ground and replacing them with a vague new system. Those criticisms are usually based in historical analysis of attempts to do exactly that, which have typically resulted in a lot of bloodshed, generally from the most vulnerable people in society. They also often yield a new and not necessarily more egalitarian power structure that continues to oppress people, sometimes more aggressively than the institution preceding it.

For the same reason, I am not a communist. I think communism offers too many opportunities for unscrupulous people to seize power, creating more inequality under the banner of equality itself. Again, this position comes from reading the history of communist states from as many perspectives as I can get my mitts on.

I frequently critique assumptions that capitalism is the only root of social problems. This does not mean that I am pro-capitalism. It means that I think you have to think deeply about problems, especially when it makes you uncomfortable, to understand how to solve them. Many problems that capitalism exacerbates are actually rooted in problems about impulse control (as with Ideas Jerry the other day), basic human social dynamics, emotional regulation, complex traumas, and many other things. You must understand how these problems arise before you can construct a structure that guards against them effectively.

Fundamentally, I think you are probably optimistically spamming this message to anyone that you think will listen. I invite you to consider how effective that is as a tactic to advance your politics: when you pick the wrong person, at best you leave the impression that people serving your ideology are essentially self centered and bad at listening. At worst, you wind up pissing people off enough to sit down and lay out exactly how many points they disagree with you on. Coalitions of solidarity are based on listening carefully to one another and finding the places we agree on; shit like that is antithetical to building them because it sends a very effective signal that you are either very, very bad at listening or uninterested in doing so.

Either way, get out of my house.