Under the heading of this blog, the main intent was to address things that make you do a double-take when you hear them. In that spirit, I have decided to quote physicians who practice what I’ve labeled “Karma Medicine.”
Karma, on a basic level, is the belief that, in each of your reincarnations, you do good things & bad things. Opening doors for people laden with packages/disabled/caring for children would be “good karma.” Deliberately slamming the door in their face (especially if you laugh derisively & show everyone how “funny” it is) would, of course, be “bad karma.” Good karma, to them, means you’ll never be sick; bad karma is what makes you sick.
Lord knows, if that were true, dictators & tyrants who make millions miserable would be deathly ill & would die, impoverished by the cost of their medical care. Yet, those creeps are usually in excellent health; if not, they’re never short on medical care or money.
Doctors who’ve adopted this relatively simplified version of karma have done so claiming an “openness” to CAM (Complementary & Alternative Medicine), including an over-emphasis on their interpretation of the “mind-body” connection. In fact, they rarely have much idea at all about CAM-just try getting them to give you consults to CAM practitioners in various types of massage, meditation, aromatherapy, etc. They’ll roll their eyes the same way teenagers do when they’re going through one of their “parents just don’t get it” phases, & tell you the only consultation they’ll give you is to a good psychiatrist; that you’re a hypochondriac; & that you need to stay away from the Internet & quit feeding your obsession with proving that you’re sick.
This is especially true of chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, Chiari, lupus, complex regional pain syndrome, trigeminal neuralgia, Behcet’s syndrome, & any number of illnesses that no one can see, & which therefore (in their eyes) must not exist. “But you don’t look sick! You’re the picture of health!” is often heard from know-it-all civilian & medical types, who then go on to give you unsolicited advice on stress management, diet, exercise, work-life balance, & their cousin who had this & got all better on supplements, some sort of weird diet, & extreme exercise.
The problem is, doctors charge you money for this “What do you expect me to do about it?” attitude.
Push a few buttons & you’ll hear all sorts of things about how you’ve somehow brought this on yourself, ergo, you don’t really deserve medical care. Your karma made you sick, that’s your mess to clean up, not theirs. Ask them, “For what, exactly, will you be billing me?” Why, they’ll respond, for setting you straight, stopping you from believing that you’re ill, setting you on the path to good mental & physical health, showing you how badly you need to clean up your karma.
It’s just as bad for those brave medical souls who believe that not knowing what a sickness is means you find out (vs. blaming the victim). You look for physiologic clues to unknown pathogens &/or metabolic dysfunctions. Lazy people don’t like being shown up as lazy. Instead of exerting their energy joining more industrious colleagues in their pursuit of information leading to treatments, even cures, they expend energy lambasting their colleagues who want to help patients. They discredit them; lie about & to them; make their lives a misery.
Since this question is posed by so very many lazy doctors, who’ve adopted a false definition of karma & the mind-body connection as an excuse to collect a fee while doing nothing, I’d like to answer it:
Your job, fool.
Doctor, you’ll expend far more energy blaming patients & blackballing your colleagues than you’d spend doing something constructive. You’ll make money in the short run, but the doctors whose response is, “Tell me what you’re experiencing,” & “I’ll try to find something to help,” will make more in the long run easing human suffering. All the medical advances that have made people well & doctors wealthy have come from those who said, “Let me help,” not the ones who say, “What do you expect me to do about it?”
So, are you going to collect your own bad karma from abusing patients & colleagues, or counteract it by doing something positive & garnering some good karma for a change? If the answer is the former, may your karma gather you the responses (& associated ripoffs) you’ve given so many others; may you always hear how your sickness is due to your own bad karma, followed by a large bill &, “What do you expect me to do about it?”
