Have you been medicalized since birth? A simple way to find out is to answer the question: Who delivered you? Even if you don’t know their name, if you said something along the lines of a medical doctor or OBGYN, then there is a good chance you have been medicalized since birth.
To further investigate this concept, ask your mother who delivered you. If she gives you a similar response, there is a high probability that this sense of medicalization runs deep.
But unless your mother is an OBGYN, this isn’t very factual. The fact is, the mother delivers the baby, not the OB. The exception to this rule is birth by C-section.
Cesarean Sections have become alarming more prevalent in our day and age, making up 32% of all births in the US. So maybe at one point in the future, if this trend continues, we might find the OBGYN as the true delivery of the baby in all cases.
Right at the start, we are handing over our health rights to someone else. For the majority of people in our culture, the modern medical model is that someone. The medical model is not ill-willed in its intentions. But they are in a position of control. Which can be abused.
The problem is not the medical model per se, but that we’ve given up our health completely to that one model. Why such a surrender?
I think it boils down to fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of symptoms and the potential for sickness. Fear that we don’t know what to do about symptoms and sickness. The pathogenic model of medicine can exploit this fear and run it ragged. The “knight in shining armor” now wears a white coat and aims to be our surrogate and savior from disease.
There is a rise in un-educating women about the normal physiology that happens with birth and the health of their families. I think it starts with the “due date dilemma”.
“What if I’m early?”
“What if I’m late?”
An expecting mother might ask herself these common questions. But please answer this question for me: When did a due date become an expiration date? When did a mother stop relying on the innate wisdom of her body to know when a baby is done growing and ready for delivery?
We’ve left it up to medicine to determine when the baby is ready for delivery. And if it doesn’t fit within the neat little window, then the baby must be extracted by medical means.
Because medicine emphasizes disease rather than health, it can focus its attention and education on all the things that can go wrong with the body. A negative will beget a negative exponentially unless a positive is added to the equation.
Chiropractic aims to be that positive. Chiropractic doesn’t ignore disease, but rather chooses to focus on health and all the wonderful things that can go right with the body. This positive paradigm fits within the salutogenic model.
Salutogenesis literally means “that which gives birth to health.” It is the complete opposite of pathogenesis, which means “that which gives birth to disease.” Pathogenesis is the foundational perspective for the conventional medical model. Salutogenesis asks the question: How do we create and maintain health? In a Salutogenic model, health is the starting point. Disease is the absence of health, not the other way around.
As a culture, we need to be more familiarized not medicalized when it comes to our health; the education of the “family” should be our emphasis. Getting each individual house in healthy order is the proper foundation for being well as a society. As parents, don’t be afraid to rely on your maternal and paternal instincts. Medicine and all other forms of health care intervention work best when they focus on your family’s needs, not their wants.
Jarek Esarco, DC, CACCP is a pediatric, family wellness and upper cervical specific Chiropractor. He is an active member of the International Chiropractic Pediatric Association (ICPA). Dr. Jarek has postgraduate certification in Pediatric Chiropractic through the ICPA. Dr. Jarek also has postgraduate certification in the HIO Specific Brain Stem technique through The TIC Institute. Dr. Jarek is happily married to his wife Regina. They live in Youngstown, Ohio with their daughter Ruby.