At a friend’s birthday party, two women in their sixties talked about their experiences with the health care system. One had had cancer. The other was considering surgery to try to reduce her disability from back pain.

 As someone who writes a lot about the hazards of modern mainstream medicine, I eavesdropped, thinking I might snag some good material.

The cancer survivor raged about how she had been treated by the “hacks” who called themselves doctors. The back pain sufferer was right there with her. She hadn’t been given enough information to know what to do about her condition. She had been disabled for years and she wanted answers. Both of them were angry. Traumatized.

 I felt for them. But I couldn’t help but think—especially in the case of the cancer survivor, who had been pronounced cancer-free—that hey, you know, maybe it was rough, but you are alive, aren’t you? Didn’t the hacks kind of…save your life?

 Nearby sat the birthday boy: our 71-year-old dear friend who has Parkinson’s disease so advanced that he can no longer speak intelligibly, feed himself or walk more than a few feet without resting. He has had this disease since his early 40s. His body is bent in a tortured S-curve. He weighs 90 pounds. For the past few years he has relied far less on the medications that used to prevent him from being completely frozen—they’d cause him to reel wildly around, eyes bugging out, arms and legs gesticulating so erratically that one would wonder how he stayed upright—and more on a set of electrodes implanted in his brain. These electrodes stimulate his brain in places that enable him able to move with relative precision. At least, he could until recently. A major medical miracle, these electrodes. Nothing but good has come of them for him.

I've been reading a lot of really venomous blog posts and articles by women who've been subjected to hospital birthing experiences that they feel were unnecessarily traumatic. There's so much pain there. So much fury at the doctors themselves, by whom these women feel they have been violated. 

 I don't see that problem is in the doctors themselves. They’re convenient scapegoats because they have authority. They have all this education. But they're working within a broken system. We want so badly to trust that they can fix what ails us. If they can’t, who can? If we can’t trust them, what then?

Medicine doesn’t deserve the exalted place in which we want to put it. They do the best they can, in their human way, with the tools and skills and insights they possess. Another partygoer, who happens to be a lawyer who represents doctors in malpractice cases, piped in: “The problem is that people think medicine is a science. And really, it’s more of an art.”

 We can expect our fellow humans, with all of their frailties and inconsistencies and brilliances, to help us if they can when we need help. If we’re beyond help or if the proffered help isn’t effective, does it make sense to simmer or shout with anger about the people who tried to help us? Is that what’s most healing in the long run? I wish for the two women I heard at that party to find their way to forgiveness. I wish the same for the women who feel traumatized and angry about their birthing experiences and the doctors who facilitated them.

I know not everyone believes that emotions can make us sick, but I'm reasonably certain that even if unresolved anger and resentment don't create disease outright, they make our lives a lot less satisfying even when we're healthy.

Entropy rules. People get sick and die. Doctors aren't up to the task of changing this. Yes, they make mistakes and some of them cause truly horrible pain and distress. But if we expect them to whip out the deux ex machina in the face of diseases and disorders that originate in a sick society and a soiled planet, we're going to be disappointed.   

Sure, we’re entitled to health care. But we aren’t entitled to health. Ask the people who live under constant threat of massacre, deadly infectious diseases, or death during childbirth. Ask those who count it a great day when they have enough food to feed their children.

Living a long, healthy life isn’t a right. It’s a privilege. With all our notions of entitlement, we end up blaming the messenger.