"The difficulty with becoming a patient is that as soon as you get horizontal, part of your being yearns, not for a doctor, but for a medicine man"
About this Quote
The moment you’re flattened into a hospital bed, Shana Alexander suggests, you’re also flattened into a different kind of citizen: someone stripped of ordinary competence and forced to outsource their body to strangers. Her line is funny in that dry, journalistic way that lands like a diagnostic tap on the knee. “Horizontal” isn’t just physical posture; it’s a social position. Upright, we negotiate, choose, posture, perform control. Horizontal, we submit to routines, gowns, charts, and the low-grade humiliation of being handled.
The “difficulty” isn’t pain or bureaucracy, though those hover nearby. It’s the psychological whiplash of becoming “a patient,” a noun that implies passivity and waiting. In that vulnerability, Alexander points to an uncomfortable truth: modern medicine, for all its miracles, can feel emotionally stingy. The doctor offers expertise, protocols, probabilities. The “medicine man” offers story, ritual, attention, the sense that your suffering fits into a narrative someone can hold.
She isn’t endorsing quackery so much as diagnosing a craving for meaning when autonomy collapses. It’s a critique of clinical detachment and a warning about the vacuum it creates. When institutions treat people like cases, people go hunting for caretakers who treat them like humans - even if the treatment is more theater than therapy. Alexander’s insight still stings in an era of white coats and patient portals: science can be right and still leave you lonely, and loneliness is a powerful drug.
The “difficulty” isn’t pain or bureaucracy, though those hover nearby. It’s the psychological whiplash of becoming “a patient,” a noun that implies passivity and waiting. In that vulnerability, Alexander points to an uncomfortable truth: modern medicine, for all its miracles, can feel emotionally stingy. The doctor offers expertise, protocols, probabilities. The “medicine man” offers story, ritual, attention, the sense that your suffering fits into a narrative someone can hold.
She isn’t endorsing quackery so much as diagnosing a craving for meaning when autonomy collapses. It’s a critique of clinical detachment and a warning about the vacuum it creates. When institutions treat people like cases, people go hunting for caretakers who treat them like humans - even if the treatment is more theater than therapy. Alexander’s insight still stings in an era of white coats and patient portals: science can be right and still leave you lonely, and loneliness is a powerful drug.
Quote Details
| Topic | Health |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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