Nurse here! This keeps popping into my mind, keeps leaving me drawing a blank. Healthcare is a massive and resource-devouring industry, but is stuffed with people who actually give a shit about the people around them: the industry is a good candidate for improvement, and the people in it are likely to actually embrace those improvements (well, barring the odd salty af mofo who loses their shit at the first signs of change, but that person’s in every industry - they’ll figure it out eventually.)
I work in a run-of-the-mill hospital in the US, which encourages staff to take on system improvement projects, and these are were I see potential - especially for new nurses gunning for promotions.
The problem is what and how. All I can think of are things like recycling programs to tackle medical waste, but (at my facility at least) the waste that isn’t already being recycled is either biohazardous or risks becoming biohazardous (like medication waste is huge, but we can’t save half a vial of unused injection due to the possibility of that being contaminated by the first needle that drew from it).
So, looking for project ideas, both that I can start to implement myself, or to suggest to other staff looking to polish their resume. Smaller scale stuff is great for newer nurses; big scale stuff I can throw at management and see what sticks.
Let me know if you think of anything! Thanks all!
I’m afraid hospitals are systemically and ideologically incompatible with solar punk.
getting together with other medics and starting neighborhood clinics however would be much easier than attempting reform from the inside.
also stuff like DIY medicine, it would help me greatly as a trans person if medics stopped policing medical knowledge and taught us their skills instead. the idea that medicine can only be safe if practiced with a license is one that’s getting countless trans people killed because we’re denied the autonomy to save ourselves. the major example is DIY estrogen being safe but most doctors would tell me succumbing to a dysphoria-induced suicide is the healthier option
The problem there is that the skills and knowledge go hand-in-hand, and something being safe vs not is dependent on it being used correctly. If you’re encountering reluctance from medical folks to give you DIY resources, it’s most likely from the fear of giving you advice that’ll turn around and fuck you up. And we don’t want to fuck you up. But as you mentioned, the longer term consequences (suicide) potentially far exceed fucking up a shot… like degradation of your subcutaneous tissue because something that was supposed to be injected intramuscular was erroneously injected into the fat, causing it to break down and leaving you with a nasty pit (clinically minor, but disfiguring). Or failing to instruct you to sanitize the stopper and your injection site with alcohol pads, leading to necrotizing fasciitis, (which can kill you).
All that said, I agree with you - you’re more than capable of understanding those risks and taking the time to learn both the skills and the knowledge to mitigate them. Whether or not to take that risk is solely up to you. What I’d advise is to take a deep dive into literally every step of the process: The DIY guide you found said to use one needle to draw the solution and another one to inject… why? With an inch and a half needle… why? that’s a 27 gauge… why? Says inject it into your thigh… why? At a 90* angle… why? What do you do if something goes wrong? How can you even tell if something’s gone wrong? You get the gist. The skill of actually giving a shot is the easy part - understanding the ‘why’ gets crazy complicated.
Numbers and such pulled out of my ass - I don’t know squat about estrogen, so real instructions will almost certainly be different. But if you’re doing it DIY, you really do need to become your own nurse. (and if that stuff comes naturally to you, get your ass into nursing school!!).
Having never given estrogen before, I’m pretty sure you already know more about it than I do, but if any of your DIY instructions seem odd or even wrong, feel free to bounce it off me and I’d be happy to share what insight I have.
I’m sorry, but this is just naive. Many hospitals and doctors refuse to offer HRT based solely on self-identification even though WPATH acknowledges that it is just as safe as a psychological gatekeeping track.
And when HRT is provided, trans men are trusted to do testosterone injections bybthe same hospitals that require trans women to visit a GP for estrogen injections even though both are equally risk-prone. Anti-androgens can be more complicated, but that too can be taught in an hour.
Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of trans people across the world take pharmaceuticals from illegal and semi-legal suppliers with no bad batches that I’ve heard of. Like with addictive drugs, illegal suppliers tend to know their stuff.
Perhaps you’ve rationalized your fear at trans DIY as concern about people fucking up, but when and where that fear is applied is simply inconsistent, and systematically disempowers and provides worse service to trans people, women, people of color, and other minorities.
What people in medicine are afraid of is empowering minorities. Concern for our wellbeing if we were to be empowered is just the language to justify that feeling.
I’m not saying you’re deliberately setting out to be discriminatory, just that the medical culture has taught you to have a different gut reaction to a cis man regulating his own medication than to a trans nonbinary person doing the same.
Previous poster specified “medics” which I understood as the people on the actual units providing care; and their reluctance to teach skills without the foundation of knowledge that enables those skills. My take was to put myself in their shoes and consider why - the very obvious answer being that doing so can cause harm. The number of bigots working the front lines is of course higher than zero, but also a very clear minority, so jumping to that as the answer to why they behave a certain way around trans people is not correct.
You’re getting more into all the bullshit that influences healthcare at the systemic level: administration, politics, religion… and your right, the answers there get a lot more nefarious, but are very much not the people the previous poster or I was discussing.
I agree. Solar punk is about healing the sick world and sick society that’s making us sick so we don’t need health care the same way we do now, using more toxic chemicals to attack the things all the toxic chemicals and hateful attitudes did to us to destroy our mental health and our bodies to make us so sick so frequently.
hey, sounds like you’re coming from a mad pride perspective based on the “toxic chemicals” rhetoric.
as a mad person myself, I don’t believe using unscientific language like that helps us achieve liberation. whether something is toxic depends on dosage, circumstance and context. for example, regardless if estrogen saved my life, administering it to a trans man in the same dosage I use would probably kill him. can you see how me calling a certain medicine toxic because it killed someone even would be taking things out of context?
chemicals are value-neutral, and making this association between something being chemical and something being harmful and “artificial” can easily lead to ableist policy like MAHA.
thank you for reading thus far and hopefully this is not taken as an attack on you ❤️
I appreciate your clarification, I have no idea what “mad pride” or “mad person” means if that is some kind of acronym or has some meaning other than “angry”, I have no particular organized agenda besides being “mad” in the sense of “angry at the state of the world” and while I might have been a bit loose and uninformed with terminology but I specifically had in mind chemotherapy where toxic chemicals are used to kill the rapidly-growing cancer cells faster than they kill the not-so-fast growing healthy cells.
Hopefully that clears things up although it probably just makes it more confusing. I have no idea. I’m just shouting aimlessly into the void most days. Sorry.
Even if we had pristine environments and only healthy food, cancer will still occur quite frequently. I of course support researching more effective cancer treatments than we currently have (and what we do have should be free to anyone who needs it), but until better options are available, chemotherapy, as awful as it can be, can be very effective depending on the specific cancer, and has spared many a horrible death despite it being a poison itself.
We would condemn tens of thousands to a slow death if we were to cast aside toxic chemotherapy without an adequate replacement that has proven itself.