While I must give credit to Mia Mingus for her efforts to spread her views and fight for equality on several fronts, gender, sexuality, and ability, I was angered by her response to one of our classmates personal stories and by her disdain for the medical field. I feel as if Mingus was over generalizing by claiming all her doctors were only interested in the financial aspect of medicine and in advancing their careers. In addition, I thought Mingus would appreciate our classmates personal story and jump on the opportunity to show a positive side of the medical field. However, she quickly responded to the story with the idea that one shouldn't be so focused on the ability to walk. I was completely shocked.
I feel as if Mingus was extremely pessimistic and judged the entire medical field solely on her experiences. While I have no way to possibly comprehend the pain Mingus endured or the poor beside manner of her doctors, I feel as if she was too harsh. Mingus may have accepted her outcome of being reliant upon a wheelchair but what about the people who have not? Should they be forced to stay in a wheelchair just because other "disabled" people want society to change and become accommodating to all? Why shouldn't he/she try to walk?
When I hear people criticize the medical community I find myself thinking about ways in which it has enriched people's lives. For example, this past summer I was a nanny for a set of twins with cerebral palsy and their younger brother who was healthy. While the twin sister will never be able to walk or talk, she has made great strides since birth due to medicine. She wears braces on her legs at night and for several hours a day, stands in a special device that strengthens her leg muscles, and attends weekly physical training sessions. With a lot of hard work and patience, she has gone from being completely immobile to being able to turn onto her stomach, push herself up into sitting position, and pull herself up in her crib onto her knees. With a little bit of help, she is know able to pull a shirt over her head, hold a cup, and use a spoon and fork. In addition, due to all her medical help, she is only now coordinated and strong enough to start using a wheelchair. Without medical advancements, she would be completely dependant upon her parents and guardians for the rest of her life.
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2 comments:
Isn't standpoint theory interesting as this was not my understanding of what Ms. Mingus said at all. Ms. Mingus experiences, while personal, reflect a large contingent of people with disabilities.
What you characterize as disdain I heard as real questions about how doctors separate aesthetic ideas about how the body should look or move from their conceptions of health.
What you read as pessimism I read as extremely optimistic; wouldn't it be great if all bodies were accepted as they were and not deemed deficient or pathological?
I did not hear Ms. Mingus arguing that people should be "forced to stay in a wheelchair." What I did hear was her questioning why medicine works to make people walk like "normal" people, when for some, maybe walking isn't normal.
Disability is an inevitable part of life. Medicine can not "fix" everything and even if it could, should it? One of the things I hear from the class is that persons with disabilities should be given accommodations but isn't trying to "fix" people a better solution. It's this logic though that slows down the call for accommodations by assuming that people will ultimately or hopefully not need them one day.
I wonder if a racial analogy might be useful. Marginalized racial groups face a lot of discrimination in this country and in a lot of arenas like buying houses, applying for loans, getting a job, etc. It would be a lot easier to be white in today's society as we have seen not only how prejudices harm groups of color but also privilege whiteness. It's a lot easier to move through the world on two legs but doesn't this have to do with how the world is set up?
Is that a useful analogy?
Although it is obvious that the way people go about expressing their opinions has a lot to do with how their thoughts are accepted, I couldn’t help but notice a comment similar to Mia Mingus’ in the article by Audre Lorde called “A burst of light: living with cancer.” Lorde explains that she attempted to question whether or not she should have a liver biopsy surgery and that her doctors would not listen to her opinion. She then goes on to say “I would like to think that this doctor was sincerely motivated by a desire for me to seek what he truly believed to be the only remedy for my sickening body, but my faith in that scenario is considerably diminished” (150).
It is interesting here as well because Lorde had already received treatment for breast cancer and established trust in the doctors that she dealt with, but she is still quick to note the potential racism and sexism in her treatment by the doctors. Perhaps, like Mingus, she was bitter that the cancer had returned and she was once again facing a life-changing decision. It is also possible that the existence of doctors who are doing their job just to make money and are hardly concerned with their patients’ views is outweighing the enrichment in people’s lives that other doctors are responsible for. Either way, no one should be close-minded enough to believe wholeheartedly that doctors at one end of the spectrum or the other, but be realistic enough to see that both types exist, along with many others and we should be mindful of this in any medical situation.
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