Thoughts for essay in progress

Title 

 Back ache, piles and athlete's foot - why we’ve become obsessed with our bodies

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It seems these days that everybody has become totally and utterly consumed with their ‘health’ and not in a good way. We have become obsessed with our bodies. Every single person you talk to has something wrong with them. It has become our currency in Britain.

When we used to be famous for talking about the weather, the new answer to the greeting, ‘Morning, how are you?’ has become, ‘ Oh, my shoulder’s giving me jip this morning,’ or ‘my bunions playing up’ or ‘ got a bad knee’

The problem is rather than battling on with the - hated term as I’m not a patriot -  ‘stiff upper lip’ that we are supposed to have, people are running to the doctor for every little complaint. In an endless cycle of seeking diagnosis, treatment, cure which is completely unsustainable for an already failing NHS.

As I have navigated my way through a 30 year healthcare career, I have seen many successes and failures in treatments and operations and it seems to me that the best outcomes are from the stories of people that simply ‘get on with it’ 

One such story is of a Polish woman age 53 who has lived in the UK for 10 years told me of her experience.

She was having back pain and shooting pains down her legs which were worsening over time. She sought help from her GP and was prescribed pain killers, of which, over time, she had to take more and more to get the same effect plus she was getting stomach pains as well as worsening pains in her back and legs which were becoming debilitating. 

Her relatives in Poland were worried so she went to a Polish hospital where she was admitted and they treated her. As a result of this treatment, including IV painkillers etc. she had extravasation injuries (this is when the drugs leak from the vein into the tissues and cause damage) and eventually near sepsis for which she had to have IV antibiotics (the more drugs administered the greater the side effects leading to more problems and drugs). They diagnosed her with a stomach ulcer - a result/side effect of all the painkillers - and Sciatica, caused by trapped nerves in one or two of the vertebrae in her spine, and told her she needed an operation. 

She did not want an operation and, besides, it would cost £5000 in Poland, which she didn't have, and to get this on the NHS would take a long time on a waiting list. 

She left the Polish hospital with as many morphine patches as she could get (at least these would not aggravate the stomach ulcer and allow it to heal a little) and returned home to her husband in England. The pain got steadily more severe. She said she was crying with the pain and could only walk a few agonising steps at a time. She had hit rock bottom. 

It was then that she started to think about the pain and what she described as a process of 'letting go'. Instead of the pain being the focus she gradually pushed herself to walk more, at first with the frame she had been given, every day, more and more, until found that slowly her pain and range of movement began to improve until one day her husband said to her, 'You're smiling!' She went from hardly being able to walk to being able to even dance a little, something she never thought she would do again. She had also improved her diet, cut down on alcohol and lost a lot of weight which definitely contributed to her healing.

I have heard many other stories from people, similar to this. Almost as if by not making the ‘problem’ the focus of your life then the problem somehow shrinks away.

My own recent, and certainly not glamorous, experience, is of a pile or haemorrhoid,  which much to my horror at the time, appeared one morning completely out of the blue. Not an unusual complaint for a middle aged woman who’s had two kids but even so I had not had any trouble with constipation or any such cause. It was about the size of a walnut and it did cross my mind, ‘Oh God’ is this it now. Am I going to have this forever? Confiding in a work colleague/friend her response was, ‘you’ll probably need that removed surgically. My sister had the same thing. She had to have an operation’

After trying some recommended cream, from another friend, which did nothing, I did consult the GP and after sending a picture of it - oh the horror! - to establish that it wasn’t anything more ominous, he did advise that it would probably just disappear over time. And ‘lo and behold’, after a month or so, it did. In other words. I just ignored it in the end and it went away.

Thinking about the average Brit these days. When they get a fairly harmless condition, like athletes foot for example, the temptation is to go into a panic about it. And of course the first thing everyone does these days is ‘google it’ where we are faced with an endless supply of horrifying images and differing explanations. We think, as I did, ‘This will be my life now!’ and we enter into endless research into the best cream to treat it. The first cream may not work so we have to find another cream. We may try another and another. And all this research costs us time and all these creams cost us money. 

A lot of people then fall into the trap of seeking the ‘alternative medicines’ Often these are the ‘higher’ class women, the upper middle classes. Those who have more time and money on their hands to seek out the most expensive lotions and potions. Or some voodoo treatment from their spiritual healer that will draw their energy into the exact correct frequency to ensure their soul finds inner peace.

And of course all of these creams, potions and tinctures are going to find their way into our water courses. And all the time spent on spiritual sessions and sound bowl therapy, is time taken up that could be spent on the good of the community, volunteering or joining the council.

I have a friend with extremely itchy skin between his toes which he deliberately doesn’t call ‘athletes foot’. He’s had it for years. It comes and goes. Sometimes it's very itchy and sometimes not. There is nothing that changes in his life to account for the changes in ‘it’. If anything, it sometimes gets better when his feet are wetter. The point is he doesn’t obsess about it. In fact, he says he loves it. He gets pleasure from scratching it and says it feels better than sex! Sometimes he scratches it so much it bleeds. But this heals up and it is never a problem. And not putting sudacrem on it constantly, means that this is not adding to the pollution in all of our streams and rivers.

Watching the film, ‘The Salt Path’ last night, there’s a scene where Moth is on the point of death due to hydration issues. While quite a lot of people have been complaining that there may be some fraud in this book and film, if you ask me, that’s the real fraud, as I’d like to know when someone last died of dehydration in a typical British summer.

For years we’ve had a relentless message, symbolised in this scene, that the body is an ultimately fragile problem that needs endless self caring and concern. I contend this does nobody any good. In fact, I’ve been parked up on a section of the salt path this last weekend and it seems there are far fewer walkers than ever before - the only self care that really works - getting the body huffing and puffing up these fantastic paths.