Comfort
There is nothing better than motherly care if one’s sick and feeling unwell. A cool hand on a feverish forehead, chicken soup to regain some strength. Without asking, mother seems to know what is needed.
Mother knows best because she understands you like no other. She doesn’t need to ask or calculate. She knows instinctively how to anticipate.
Receiving love makes the suffering more bearable. It is like a loving energy balaces the disturbance.
Commercial care
Like all good things in life, caring and nursing have been commercialized and systematized. This has changed the concept of care and caring fundamentally. The whole proces is micromanaged until the last plaster, transforming the phenomenon of care and cure into a variety of proceedings.
The sick and needy are reduced to objects. And it has become the job of the caretaker to extract a profit for the employers. They are no longer suppose to be at service to the patients.
There are plenty of ill which makes their individual worth little. The amount of money circulating in the health-industry as a whole is on the other hand enormous. A patient has become a harvest field for data and a guinea pig for science.
Telling a ‘customer’ to wait until the ailments pass or teach them how to learn to live with discomfort, would be bad economics. Instead the ‘clients’ are asked to monitor, analyze and describe their pains and symptoms over and over again.
In order to get any help, the ill have to direct all their energy to their discomfort and other possible abnormalities. This fixation on any perceived deviation of life can open the gate, amongst others, to hypochondria and body dysmorphic disorders.
After all, who decides what a healthy body and mind looks and feels like?
What is the frame of reference when it comes to our feelings?