Traditional Healthcare Doesn’t Account for Capacity

One of the things I’ve come across in all of my years as a professional patient is there isn’t much space in a conversation given to capacity.

The narrative goes as follows: Seek isolated support for your symptoms, if your symptoms don’t resolve you’re not trying hard enough, keep doing everything you were doing but also be sick enough for it to be valid. Rinse and repeat.

I remember being a young adult, sitting in my specialist’s office at the time (who was designed to treat an individual bodily function, and who was writing in my chart with red pen) saying if she wanted me to do all of the things she was asking of me, I essentially needed to quit my job, stay home and solely focus on healing. The healthy foods, the strict new diet plan, the exercise regimen, the appointments, I could do all of it only if I dropped everything else. If I did this, if I fully committed to the healing option that was being presented to me, I would have no way to pay bills, no social life and no further education. The reply was essentially this wasn’t possible, and I would just have to figure it out.

Spoiler alert: I couldn’t figure it out. And I thought I was the problem. I failed the treatment plan, I was responsible for my symptoms not getting better, it was all my fault.

And I thought that because the industrial healthcare system, while really good at taking care of actual medical emergencies, lacks when it comes to chronic conditions, whole person care and conversations surrounding capacity.

When you live in a chronically ill body, your capacity is already reduced. You’re not starting at the same place as able bodied individuals. And here’s the kicker: your experience in a your body isn’t solely revolving around the “problem area.” Your experience in your body is shaped by things like how well resourced you are, what you’re eating, how much you’re sleeping, how stressed you are…

But when that isn’t taken into account, of course you’re going to feel like you’re failing. You are set up to fail. There is no container that holds the entirety of who you are as a human, and the entire person is the one seeking care, not just the symptom or the affected body part.

Why doesn’t traditional healthcare care about capacity? The short answer is they can’t. Our current medical model is set up on efficiency, treating life threatening emergencies and getting you back to your life. Which, when that is what we need, is fantastic. The much larger answer is capacity complicates things. It’s easier to isolate organs, functions, specialties, slap a band aid on an issue and hand out a quick fix.

So where does that leave those of us who have the lifetime subscription to the medical model? It can often feel like just being another cog in the wheel, and while we can take what works and leave what doesn’t, building our own care plan brick by brick, that can get really exhausting really fast.

For that answer you’ll have to come back next week and get the rest of the story…