What if Being Healthy Isn’t the Goal?
What if?
Throughout the years, the founding ethos behind Saturn’s Daughter Apothecary hasn’t changed. We believe that access to well-rounded education and treatment options empowers people to engage in intuitive health & wellness practices. But let’s interrogate that deeper.
What if the goal of healthcare (in all forms) isn’t health - but instead access to resources.
As time goes on, the insidious nature of the wellness industry (as well as many western healthcare practices) continues to elevate health as a virtuous goal, something that both should be and can be achieved by everyone - if they try hard enough. This culture of achievement ostracizes a huge amount of people, especially disabled and otherwise marginalized people. If you just try hard enough, you won’t get ill, you won’t become disabled, and you’ll be able to heal yourself. If you don’t try hard enough, buy enough, do enough, your illness is deserved and you’re discarded as a lost cause (or worse).
Within the wellness space, this shows up as:
“wake up to the truth of xyz toxin”
“there’s cancer in your food supply”
“what I eat in a day to cure my PCOS'“
While there is some truth in these statements, and personal health & wellness journeys are an individual choice, that doesn’t mean the delivery of this kind of messaging doesn’t cause harm. Potentially without knowing it, these “wellness influencers” & “health crusaders” are perpetuating the idea that health is a virtuous end goal, and not performing well enough on the test means your body’s inevitable fallibility is your own fault. Behind the curtain, these statements look more like…
“People who don’t engage in these practices are stupid & willfully ignorant”
“If you still get sick while you were doing this, you didn’t do it well enough”
“People who can’t afford to engage in these practices are not of my concern”
Some people are saying the above happily, and some don’t know they’re participating in this messaging to begin with. Regardless of the individual, the cultural message remains: be healthy, or die trying.
If the ongoing pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that illness and disability is something that can come for any of us, regardless of what we do “right.” As disability advocate, Imani, often says, “every form of marginalization leads to disability.” One Covid-19 infection can lead an otherwise “healthy” individual into a battle with chronic illness. Similarly, you can “do everything right” and be one of the many people diagnosed with cancer. In a culture that glorifies health & villainizes illness, the many people who experience this shift in their perception of health are left to navigate a new world without the societal privilege of being able-bodied. New, terrifying worlds open up as these individuals start to navigate a healthcare (and wellness) system that does not want to accommodate them - because they are ill.
The implication that illness = sin discards people with chronic illness & disability. and it will discard you when you age, fall ill, or become disabled.
So what should the goal be, you ask? Access to healthcare.
By shifting focus from everyone needs to be healthy to everyone needs access to healthcare, we remove the built in ways we silence people experiencing illness & disability. We expand our collective to welcome and uplift everyone, not just those lucky enough (and it is luck) to be what we determine as “healthy.” And we discard outdated & ultimately inaccurate measures for health in a world with nearly 8 billion people living in it. We can acknowledge, without shame, that illness, disability, and pain will happen in a life lived with an expiration date.
When our goal becomes creating a world abundant in community resources, we can support the collective in finding ways to thrive. In a world where food stamps are extended for fresh, culturally diverse, and nutrient rich foods, where working parents get accommodations for the demands of their families, and where education & access to well-rounded treatment options & lifestyle practices are available to all, maybe then can we see what healthy societies look like. But even in this wonderful world, illness will still exist. Disability will still exist. The goal should not be to eliminate these groups of people, rather to expand access to the resources they need to thrive. Just as the child diagnosed with cancer did not “do anything wrong” to navigate life in this way, neither did the person who could only afford to feed their children convenient, processed food. The person who has managed their depression with SSRIs for 40 years is not any less virtuous than the person who seeks an alternative approach. We are not poison because we are sick, and we are not poisoned because we define for ourselves what healthy means to us using the cards we are dealt.
We are all people living in bodies that are fragile.
Holistic lifestyle practices, western medicine advancements, and herbal remedies are all wonderful. If you have access to any or all of these things and they help you live a comfortable life, that is wonderful. If you find it helpful to implement new habits to enhance your life, more power to you!
But remember this: one day, if you become ill, it is not your fault. If you ever need accommodations to get through your day, you are not an inconvenience. If you get diagnosed with a chronic illness, and the trending remedy doesn’t work for you, it’s not because you didn’t try hard enough. And if that day comes, align yourself with the people, healthcare practitioners, and voices that amplify your need for expansive healthcare access. Because the people that make you feel less-than for being mortal, are not people who understand that mortality will come for them too.