Beige Food Six
Framework for Treatment Team Interfaces
Now here is where I am giving my opinion, based on my experience of what I’ve witnessed over the years, and I’m not providing any scientific trials on that opinion one way or the other (they don’t exist).
Wherever possible avoid discussing your food choices with your treatment team. For emphasis, this is an opinion you should be very slow to adopt because it has my sketchy anecdotal observations and that’s it.
That position is likely disappointing to those who were hoping for tips and techniques to nudge a treatment team towards understanding the value of ultra-processed foods in eating disorder recovery, and/or in the management of chronic illness that has caused secondary mitochondrial dysfunction.
The reason I advise avoiding this topic with treatment teams is because all professional relationships are parasocial in nature and the healthcare practitioner’s understanding of nutrition is based on cultural beliefs.
Parasocial Traps
A parasocial relationship is a psychological concept defining people’s experiences with media figures. Essentially viewers or media consumers come to view the personalities (celebrities, famous people) as friends who are personally known to them, despite the fact that they have had no or very limited interaction and no in person interfaces with the media personality in question [paraphrased from the Wikipedia entry on the subject].
I have since expanded on this definition in my series Set Shifting Masking and Emotional Work in the Workplace . I posit that any relationship, even an in-person one, is parasocial in nature when there is a corporate entity that has generated the primary reason for the relationship in the first place.
Parasocial relationships that exist with an inanimate corporation at the centre, are perhaps more difficult to navigate than the online or media-generated ones, because they involve all the cues of an actual in-person developing friendship.
Most practitioners today work for large organizations: health authorities, hospitals, government entities, and private or publicly traded corporations. Even independent practitioners are beholden to licensing bodies wherein the quality control metrics that the practitioner must adhere to, have been developed by yet more entities that support the financial efficiencies of those health organizations over the optimal care and safety of individual patients.
It’s not that many of those practitioners don’t want to ensure your best care and safety, it’s that they can’t. Even if they recognize that you would benefit from a diet rich in ultra-processed foods, they risk their livelihood and their own family’s financial safety in a very real way if they go so far as to support that approach.
The parasocial equation means that when they are required to choose you or the organization to which they are beholden for their income, they will choose the organization. That is not because they are without morals, ethics, or are just all about the money; it’s because the system is designed to extract value from our natural propensity to trust each other and develop social relationships and commitments. The organization stands between the practitioner and the patient at every turn. Tragically for the few practitioners who might side with their patients, they simply lose their livelihoods and also cannot protect the involved patients either.
This organization-mediated healthcare system does not want well patients; it wants acquiescent ones. In universal healthcare settings, the acquiescence is required as a way to minimize the cost of using monies collected through taxes for the benefit of the population at large. In for-profit settings, acquiescence is required to maximize profit.
With few exceptions, practitioners enter their field of expertise to help people. But in short order, they discover that they are intermediaries and mediators meant to optimize the smooth running of the system. For some, it’s the frank profit motive of their corporation; for others it’s the standards of care and licensing regulations; for still others it’s the necessity of “doing more with less” (don’t spend tax dollars), but it all leads to the same endpoint: a parasocial manipulation of both practitioner and patient for the benefit of that underlying system.
I know that that sounds bleak, but it’s the lay of land. None of us particularly gets much orientation or education when it comes to how to interact with many large complex systems that will impact very important parts of our lives. If you are a white person, you tend receive the message that things are fair and that these systems are designed to benefit those who follow the rules. Being circumspect and holding your counsel (keeping your opinions and intentions private) does not mean that you view these systems as hostile; it simply means that you respect the limits of those who fundamentally depend upon those systems for their livelihoods.
Next installment December 5
Image in outline preview: Flickr.com Rafael Edward
