How reclaiming your medical agency fights the patriarchy
Happy Sunday, Soothers. The first time (and frankly one of the only times) I ever said no to a doctor, I was 20.
I had gone on the pill, as one seems to do with zero reflection or consideration, when I became sexually active, and it was ruining my life.
My mood swings were out of control. My depression was in charge. I tried over and over again to break up with my boyfriend, sobbing how everything just felt so wrong.
I finally pieced it together - no thanks to guidance from anyone else, nobody warned me about these effects - that for me, the pill was the root cause. I went to the doctor to get off of it and get more guidance on how to proceed, and was simply told I'd have to try out a variety of other types of hormonal birth control until I found one that worked for me.
Everything in my body screamed, "You are not meant to be on hormonal birth control" and for the first time... I listened.
I said no thanks to the pill or anything else, and have managed just great for 25 years with a mix of FAM, condoms and other methods that worked for me and my partners. I've never gotten an STI. I've never had a pregnancy scare or gotten pregnant.
I did just fine, even though that doctor who I told I was not going on to birth control did everything in their power to convince me I was making a horrible and uninformed choice.
But was I?
The dominant Western medical system is one that was birthed under colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy, and yet is the system I see progressive-minded women question the least.
I've always wondered why.
Have you thought about it? Do you get why disengaging where you can from these types of medical systems have to do with, you know, smashing the patriarchy?
What does it look like to be a self healer, to take part in your own medical agency these days?
How and why is it linked to dismantling systems of oppression?
Let's start here with some background:
The modern medical system is deeply informed by the patriarchy in part because of its paternalistic model, which reinforces power dynamics between doctors and patients. For example, doctors are (still!) predominantly male, and patients, especially women and marginalized groups, are expected to passively accept the decisions made by providers without much room for discussion.
Doctors tend to hold the role of gatekeepers of the medical knowledge, and patients are encouraged to comply with doctors’ recommendations often without being fully informed about side effects, or other options.
Additionally, women of color will tell you that the modern healthcare system is deeply racist. The studies on implicit bias and racism in the healthcare profession are many, and one of the strongest places in which this is shown is the dismal maternal health outcomes for Black women.
It is hugely hierarchal — only a credentialed person outside of you has answers about your body.
The healing elements of nature (sunlight, earthing, circadian rhythms, whole foods) or emotional healing and trauma resolution (which can and do contribute to disease) are rarely offered as a first line, or offered at all.
And there's this:
Healers and medicine people used to be predominantly women.
Until they were intentionally wiped out as such.
Today's version of medicine was designed to be led mostly by men, well, by design. The design of the church and of patriarchy, that is. Author Olivia Campbell, who wrote Women in White Coats, describes it like this:
The medieval Church disagreed that wise women were doing God’s work. Churches were opening universities, professionalizing medicine to be practiced by book-learned men, so they needed to wipe out the competition. It started off relatively innocently: government-imposed fines and threats of imprisonment or excommunication if caught practicing medicine without a license. When that wasn’t enough to scare them out of their livelihoods, the Catholic and Lutheran churches took things a step further. Between 1400 and 1700, their campaign to eradicate lay healers saw more than 100,000 women in Europe burned at the stake after they were declared to be witches. Wise women who practiced folk medicine and midwifery were natural targets of suspicion: often spinsters or widows, peasants who needed to work for a living, lady loners sidelined by society, but they played an important cultural role. And some understood their expertise. They were often right to be skeptical of the skills of these newly professionalized physicians. Universities didn’t teach much more than Christian theology, philosophy, and Hippocratic theories. So unlike their university-trained professional male counterparts, lay women practitioners could offer both knowledge and experience...When we wonder why there aren’t more women physicians recorded in history books, it’s important to remember that there was a time when practicing medicine as a woman could get you killed, that women risked their lives to heal their neighbors.
And as anybody who has read Silvia Federici, scholar and theorist of domestic labor and author of Caliban and the Witch, which documents the history of the body - particularly the female body - in transition from feudalism to capitalism, knows:
Men knew in order to be in charge, they had to be both the owners of land, and the women's body, because these are one in the same.
So they cleaved us from our natural healing properties found in the earth and the land, in folk-based medicine and wisdom that was largely the provenance of women.
They accumulated land. Land used to be generally used by almost everybody, peasants included, for foraging and hunting. But the appropriation and plunder of the commons by the nobility —a process known as enclosure—marked beginning of a transition to capitalism. Regular folk were banned from using the land, nobles claimed ownership of it all and put up fences, and then folk were forced to either move to towns and become waged workers or establish serfdom relationships with landowners. (This is why being cleaved from the land and the rise of capitalism are inextricably linked.)
They then dominated and started to control women's bodies. (Hello, modern equivalent of the fall of Roe Vs. Wade. This belief that the woman's body and health is the provenance of the male-led church and state has its roots all the way back in these feudal times.)
Lastly, they erased women as medical healers through torture and murder and exile and alienation.
And here we find ourselves today, stuck in a nightmare of a patriarchal healthcare system, where women's lives are devalued, intuition is seen as quackery, herbalism or nature-based healing tactics are derided and condescended, and men, or those taught by men, influenced by men, tell us that only they know what will heal us.
And yet, here we all are, just keeping on getting sicker.
It's. Not. Fucking. Working.
So what do we do? Where do we even begin to remedy this horrifying turn of hundreds of years that is impacting our health today? As always, it starts with the individual, and how YOU begin to interact in your own medical agency. It can look something like some of these points:
We listen to and trust our bodies
We validate our own knowing and lived experiences even if it's contrary to guidance outside of us
We reconnect with the healing tools of nature: sunlight, being outside, herbs, growing our own food
For the love of god, we stop drinking alcohol, or stop numbing out on whatever we're numbing out on - TV, phone, sugar, coffee, shopping - the numbness is how they keep controlling us, and not incidentally one of the ways in which we keep getting sicker
We becoming discerning with the medical counsel we do take, running it past our intuition
And in many cases, we do the scariest thing possible, that I did at the age of 20: We discard our good girl conditioning. We step into our power, begin to trust our intuition and our body's knowing, stare down a supposedly all-knowing authority figure, and say,
"No, this is not for me."
Then we work to have our own backs, not listen to the recriminations or shaming of others, and forge our own path of healing forward.
If you're interested in disconnecting even just a little bit from the Western patriarchal medical system and learning free, accessible, nature-based healing tools to increase your health and vitality, sign up for the waitlist for Recharge Your Light. This is my six-week course and community that will help you stop feeling drained and reclaim your energy, your light, and your vitality through holistic principles of nature, circadian rhythms, environment, and diet. Everything I teach in there is free and accessible to all (though there are a few materials to get like blue-light blockers that do cost money).
We’ll learn things like…
Why artificial light, lack of natural connection with the sun and the earth, and your environment could be impacting and contributing to your health issues
How to begin to adapt to a proper circadian rhythm in your life
Why it’s important to reduce artificial light and EMFs as much as possible in your environments (with instructions and tips on how to do it)
How to begin to eat more seasonally and locally, and why that affects your health
Why just drinking water alone is not enough to stay hydrated, and how to make supercharged, mineralized and structured water that will restore your energy
The power of herbs
The power of the sun as a healing tool
What your home and office environments have to do with your health, and how to optimize them for your healing
Plus you'll be in community with a bunch of people who are interested in creating their own healing agency and disengaging from medical systems of oppression.
And if you sign up for the waitlist you'll be invited to my free 5-day Recharge Your Light Challenge in June, where in community and with my guidance we'll be trying one new natural health tactic a day.
Recharge opens for earlybird enrollment on June 3, and we begin together on June 20th (though you don't have to attend live, this would function very well as a self-paced course). And of course, June 20th is the summer solstice. I didn't choose that date on accident. The summer solstice, also known as Litha, is a pagan holiday that takes place on the longest day of the year. It's one of eight Wiccan sabbats, and is a time to celebrate the beginning of summer and nature's growing fertility. Litha celebrations include bonfires, outdoor feasts, and rituals that honor the sun's warmth and light, and the season's abundance.
So let's find the light.
Let's get back in touch with feminine, nature-based and intuitive principles of health.
Let's reclaim our agency and connection to nature along the way.
And if we end up dismantling the patriarchy in the process... we can say it was by design :)
PS: Because I know it's worth saying, I'm not devaluing modern medicine or all of the modern health system. If I break my leg or have a blood clot, or am in an accident, I want to go to a hospital. We do not need to return to feudal standards of care nor am I fetishizing that. There's been incredible scientific advances thanks to modern medicine that have helped humanity. And there are plenty of incredible people within the system who are gifted healers and do amazing work. But for preventative health, mental and emotional well-being, and particularly chronic women's issues, I think today's system leaves us sorely lacking.