Like any medical treatment, it's supposed to be a choice, but it should be a safe and mindful choice. And the methods of ensuring that need to be things that won't compound the harm or the risk; i.e. things that won't send the person into a worse panic and maybe hurt themselves, or make it harder to accept medical care in the future. Those are things that are rarely taken into account, which contributes to the often-rocky state of affairs in L-American health care.
The trick is to stack the subliminal signals of safety as high as possible -- a familiar touch or voice, something soft and fuzzy to feel, etc. -- so that even if they don't outweigh the negatives, there is at least enough countervailing input to make the alert response DEFCON 2-3 instead of DEFCON 4-5.
So much of this problem comes from a failure to recognize that behavior is communication. Medical staff tend to see patients as disobedient and bad, without stopping to wonder why people do things. Which raises the point that a rational adult patient can't be "noncompliant." That term stipulates a power difference in which the patient is subject to someone else's decisions, and while that's how the system is built in practice, legally the patient is supposed to make the decisions. It's the staff who are noncompliant with the patient's health decisions if there is a disagreement. But people don't stop to think about what's causing the dispute; it just turns into a plain power struggle 99% of the time which, frankly, nobody really wins. Those underlying reasons matter: the more resistant someone is to care, usually the worse their care experiences have been in the past.
Turq's reasons for being panicky are not just the medical abuse and other mistreatment in the past, but also the ongoing fact that soups often respond differently than ordinary people do. He needs to protect that boundary and make sure that his caregivers understand what the risks are. Conversely, he's just found out that he doesn't know everything about being a soup, and his body could hurt him in whole new ways he's never imagined. Getting him into a healthier state is going to take teamwork; he's lucky to have a good team; but they're all going to have to put in a lot of extra effort to get past the abuse issues.
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dancing_serpent
Well...
Date: 2016-05-10 06:05 pm (UTC)The trick is to stack the subliminal signals of safety as high as possible -- a familiar touch or voice, something soft and fuzzy to feel, etc. -- so that even if they don't outweigh the negatives, there is at least enough countervailing input to make the alert response DEFCON 2-3 instead of DEFCON 4-5.
So much of this problem comes from a failure to recognize that behavior is communication. Medical staff tend to see patients as disobedient and bad, without stopping to wonder why people do things. Which raises the point that a rational adult patient can't be "noncompliant." That term stipulates a power difference in which the patient is subject to someone else's decisions, and while that's how the system is built in practice, legally the patient is supposed to make the decisions. It's the staff who are noncompliant with the patient's health decisions if there is a disagreement. But people don't stop to think about what's causing the dispute; it just turns into a plain power struggle 99% of the time which, frankly, nobody really wins. Those underlying reasons matter: the more resistant someone is to care, usually the worse their care experiences have been in the past.
Turq's reasons for being panicky are not just the medical abuse and other mistreatment in the past, but also the ongoing fact that soups often respond differently than ordinary people do. He needs to protect that boundary and make sure that his caregivers understand what the risks are. Conversely, he's just found out that he doesn't know everything about being a soup, and his body could hurt him in whole new ways he's never imagined. Getting him into a healthier state is going to take teamwork; he's lucky to have a good team; but they're all going to have to put in a lot of extra effort to get past the abuse issues.