#my more recent chiropractor told me that my left side was compensating for my right side. she never helped me figure out why.

[fatal-blow]

sometimes i really don't think we've fully absorbed the realization that humans are animals. we keep trying to find new and spectacular ways to delineate between us and them, even as we try to deconstruct the beliefs of past western science

first we were put above other animals, who in the name of science were declared nothing more than organic automatons devoid of personality. today we know this isn't true, that every animal is the culmination of billions of years of chance and choices, and then a lifetime of experience to fine tune the rest.

so the discussion moved to the question: why are we different? breaking ourselves down to try to separate out the True Human Experience. we have tools--but so do other animals. we build homes and cities--likes termites and coral. we are intelligent--but then, what even is intelligence? we have culture--and yet again, so do other animals.

so we venture in vain to other traits. humans must be uniquely violent, destructive, upheaving the ecosystems of the world in a way no other creature has

but hundreds of millions of years ago, photosynthesis evolved and spurred one of the worst extinctions earth has ever seen. a species can encounter a new habitat and spread like wildfire, sometimes as destructive as one as well.

so surely our systems and our hierarchies set us apart in their depth and complexity. but it's myopic, naive even to think that other creatures don't form their own complexities outside our purview. we see our complexity because we are born and raised in it, but it's hardly what makes us different.

and in this journey to find out what makes us so different, instead we've found out the many ways that we are similar. the way our brains are similar to those of other mammals, how our bodies are all stretched out from the same general base tweaked and formed over an inconceivable number of generations. how the further we trace ourselves back, the more and more animals we share ancestors with.

i don't know where I'm going with all this. i think im frustrated with our medicine, how so much of it is grounded not in biology but in our own culture.

when we see a human not performing well, we call them lazy. when it's an animal, then something must be wrong. we understand the physiology of other animals and treat them within those bounds, yet despite what we know about the human body the way we discuss it seems frustrstingly disconnected.

maybe it's because we can talk to each other and so we assume that we can verbalize the problems we're experiencing, but language is a dismal thing to base healthcare on when most of us don't even use the same words to describe things. it's a subjective, moving target, and it assumes that the patient themself knows what's wrong. we rely too much on the ability of a patient to describe what they are experiencing, and not enough on observations of their behaviour.

my dad's shoulder hurts. he dislocated it a while ago, and it never stopped bothering him. but when i watch him he holds both shoulders forward and tense. slouching has for a long time been deemed lazy and improper, but it doesn't line up--the way my father strives for a healthy, active body but can never seem to make it work. the way he loves to be active, the way he wants to exercise, to walk and run, but it seems no matter how hard he tries he can't.

he told me his shoulder hurts, but the more i watched the more i saw that he doesn't move with the relaxed, easy movements that a man who's as active as he is should be. a human is an animal that loves to walk, and in many ways we've developed anatomy to this end, from the balanced efficiency of our bipedal forms to the way we utilize momentum as the driving force of our movement. we have science that says all this, so why does this not seem to hold true for some people? and why are we looking at them and calling them lazy? why aren't we looking for something gone awry, like the way we would a dog with a limp? we wouldn't blame the dog for not standing up the way a dog should, so why does this not hold true for humans?