Editorial: Lancet: "Disability—a neglected issue in public health"

[Andy]

"More than 1 billion people, around 15% of the global population, have some form of disability. Disabilities include long-term sensory, mental, intellectual, or physical impairments that can impact people's daily lives, health care, and support needs. The prevalence of disabilities will most certainly increase substantially in the coming decades as the global population ages. Nonetheless, people with disabilities are often neglected by health systems and experience profound inequalities in health and wellbeing outcomes. What role does public health have in tackling these inequalities?"

Open access, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(21)00109-2/fulltext

 

[rvallee]

Health-care providers too often lack the skills to meet the specific needs of people with disabilities or general awareness training to ensure that people are treated well and fairly

True. Damning. But true. They have one job. This is the job. Damning.

Anyone in health care gonna do anything about it? Nah? It's up to patients? Who have no voice in the system? Are systematically belittled and gaslighted often precisely because of the nature of their disability?

Noo, let's just expand that biopsychosocial thingy that treats disability as an attitude problem, surely that will fix it. Yoga for everyone, disability surely solved, don't even need to look, that's just tradition.

 

[Mithriel]

I am not sure if this affects us. We have chronic health problems but amputees can do wheelchair basketball and climb mountains.

Of course we can become disabled because our disease is not treated and people with disabilities can develop chronic ill health because they cannot access health care

The problem is with, for example, people with autism who have no ongoing illness but cannot get proper medical care the same way other people can because that health care is not accessible. Someone who cannot endure social contact will not go for breast scans or vaccinations.

 

[Barry]

Nonetheless, people with disabilities are often neglected by health systems and experience profound inequalities in health and wellbeing outcomes.

Thank goodness The Lancet is such a stalwart gate guardian for upholding the good science needed to underpin this ... Oh, hang on a minute ...

 

[rvallee]

Thank goodness The Lancet is such a stalwart gate guardian for upholding the good science needed to underpin this ... Oh, hang on a minute ...

I mean the BPS overlords constantly tut-tut about the discrimination we are facing, oblivious to the fact that they are its cause, because to them that stigma is not "understanding" their thing, so they want more of it, which leads to more discrimination, which means their skills are more needed than ever, over and over again. If they realized what they are doing they wouldn't be doing it in the first place. Same thing here.

Mass Dunning-Kruger as the real explanation for "mass hysteria", it really is a problem of socially-spread and culturally enforced flawed beliefs about illness, it just happens that like every piece of "evidence" for it, they just do a binary flip turning causality on its head, so that the outcome becomes the cause.