Autonomy in health
This topic will be discussed in Bellevue's decentralized event.
Bodies, cares and society : autonomy in health
The following questions can't be bypassed in our search for autonomy, and there are many reasons for that. We're talking about our own health, of course, how do we take care of it ?, What's at stake ? What about it's impact ?, what's the link between health and our society's and environnement's health ?
That's why this subject will be tackled not only in terms of reflection & self-questioning, but also with practicals and knowledge-exchanging workshops.
General Approach
Making symptoms disappear to improve our health only seemingly reveals the demands of our society : the unlimited cult of the beautiful and the strong to comply performance and rentability demands. These symptoms are those of our dephasing in front of a society with highly pathogenic (not to say cancerigene) functionments.
Factors which are maintaining us within those mechanisms and participate in alterating our physical, psychic and social health : industrialisation, technologic and scientific « progresses », nuclearisation, wage-earning, urbanisation, our ways of life, relation to time, loosing our life earning it, means of subsistance, moves, insulation (facing dayly management, the place of dependant and then non-productive persons in disease, handicap or old age) etc... with all the rupture of social and familial bonds generated, and even a certain disconnection with ourselves, with our natural biologic cycles, with our natural environnement (with Mother Nature as some might say).
Medico-chemico-pharmaceutic assistantship, in addition to secondary effects' limits and the fact that it's not resolving all, discharges us of our responsibilities, dispossesses us. So it's necessary to consider more largely its incidence on societies and environnement. What are pharmaceutical industry and research representing ? We can already evoke the environnemental impact in terms of production and consumption, and the plundering of traditional societies by life patenting.
What kind of relation do we have to health and disease, that one which underlies our relation to life, and death ? Isn't pain an alarm signal too, which informs on what's going wrong, help us to react, live better, decoding our body's messages (why this problem or that function or part of our body) ? It's precisely minding the real origins of a pain that we'll able to cure it.
Following topics will particularly be developped within th workshops :
- Questioning occidental medicine : relation to disease, body, bodies' social control (medical power, food security, risk zero, eternal youth...).
- Autonomy with regard to pharmaceutical industry by constituing alternative pharmacies : savage plants and ancestral remedies, from their picking to their transformation,...
- Autonomy with regard to psychiatric institutions : Where does madness begin ? How can community take care of suffering persons ?
- Re-appropriation of their body by women (auto gynecologic exam, reduction of sexuality related risks, unmedicalisation of motherhood and childbirth...).
- Plurality of body's approaches and cares : a introduction to various practicals.
Yet programmed :
August 20th
Workshop on pregnant mother and birth. Depending on the questions that will be raised, the organizators will be able to set up other discussions with the interested persons.
August 21st
Pharmacy in your garden. An intervention in the morning on « autonomy and health » and a savage herbs picking on the afternoon.
During the whole nine days
Three workshops on gynecological auto-exam
Around August 23rd
An intervention on « political stakes of psychic pains » and a workshop about « questions around mental disorders and relations between so-called disturbed persons and their entourage». Depending on the questions that will be raised, the organizator will be able to set up other discussions with the interested persons.
Other topics will possibly be developped : vaccination, food, dependances on toxics, what alternative ways of solidarity and assistance to health care system and disease insurance, etc...