An issue I'd like to discuss is how the United States is posing authority over it's citizens through fear. We've seen this through several examples; one being childbirth. As we saw in the film, The Business of Being Born, people were skeptical about midwifes because they were afraid of the complications that could happen. I feel that perhaps because we are always so aware of what could go wrong that we actually cause the complications to happen. Stress has a lot of impact on ones body and if a women keeps hearing negative things that could happen about there pregnancy then that in result could in return harm the baby.
Another good example of fear being used an instrument of authority is hospital care. No matter if your going in for the common cold or a heart surgery, I feel that we are all relying on the doctor to make us better and we give them the benefit of the doubt 99.9% of the time. We take what they give us because we are trained to think that they know more about the situation then we do. In certain aspects they most definitely do, for example a heart surgery I don't think grandma has a green tea to help that one. But I do feel like we jump to the conclusion that doctors need to be the ones to fix everything wrong with us. Why? Because we're scared that what we do will be wrong and harm us even more. Once I went to the doctors for a head cold and they put me on medicine to help me get over it more quickly. Looking back now I remember feeling very tired all the time when I took the medicine. Maybe pushing my body to get over something quicker is not the best way to go about things. Trusting your own body and researching what the doctor is giving you/doing to you I think will perhaps lower the sense of fear we all feel.
I completely agree with this post! This is the exact affect that authority has over us, in that trust results from a fear of not taking the authority figures advice. When something is wrong with our bodies, we go to the doctor for an answer or a cure because we don't know any other way. But I always question the expertise of doctors especially when some have given me the wrong answers or the wrong treatments. Doctors are glorified for their expertise in the medical field yet we don't consider the harm they can sometimes cause in the process as well.
ReplyDeleteThis post was very intriguing and thought provoking for me. When I sit back a truly think about it, we all depend on the aid of our doctors to cure us. Moreover, doctors are people too. Just like us, they are human and prone to mistakes. In this regard we may not always be as safe as we think, but we go to the doctors because we fear that we'll screw ourselves up even worse than before. So not only is it the fear of doing self harm that brings us back to the doctor, but it is also the possibility that the doctor will know the cure. This is why we put our faith in them. To cure our illnesses and send us on our merry way. This is the way America operates, and it's just an unspoken societal norm.
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