Anti-Mimetic Medicine
Navigating the U.S. healthcare system after your fourth wall has been shattered
Default imitation often leads us into health trouble.
If you eat the way that everybody else eats, you’re going to feel miserable. You cannot simply accept the choices offered to you on the menu of the convenience-driven, standard American diet. To be truly healthy, you need to swim upstream and make intentional choices that may not readily present themselves—they require effort to discover and adopt. (Unless you were lucky enough to be born into a family for whom the Mediterranean Diet was passed on culturally, so that it’s part of your very soul—but even then, you still likely have to work very hard to make it part of your daily life.)
The same goes for exercise. If you were to walk into a gym and look around at the machine-patterned movements surrounding you, you’d be severely restricted in the progress you could make. Despite its problems, this is why CrossFit was effective in its early days—it broke people out of the standard patterns, although CrossFit later became a hotbed of internal mimesis itself.
This brings me to what I’ve been thinking about for much of the past seven months as my wife, Claire, and I have been navigating our first pregnancy. I’ve seen a new side of the U.S. healthcare system that is woefully inadequate for our needs, with misaligned incentives and decades of mindless imitative behavior that has been reinforced since the early days of medical school for most doctors—not to mention their being embedded in a system they feel powerless to change once they’re thrust into it after residency. (Healthcare is, as Paul Graham has noted, highly susceptible to 'schlep blindness'—it is so vast and the effort required to effect change is so overwhelming that individuals often shut down, close their eyes, and avoid thinking about it altogether.)
In my family’s case, we didn’t know what we didn’t know—and how would we have?—until we stepped outside of the system. What we found, though, is an anti-mimetic world of healthcare: one which puts the patient in control of their own destiny, and which smashes the old commandment of victimizers: “Thou Shalt Not Be Aware”.
Here are some initial thoughts.