Categorizing the body
If you think you know the right way to think about the body, you are definitely wrong.
I started calling it human ping-pong ball syndrome long before I realized that I myself had a chronic and severe case. I thought I had experienced it myself from time to time, and seen others experiencing it too. I didn’t realize that all of my chronic and recurring pain came from the same cause, so I also didn’t realize that all of my pain-related experiences with the healthcare system were connected. All of my bouncing around was connected.
Human ping-pong ball syndrome: A highly unpleasant and sometimes dangerous disease where a person is bouncing around the healthcare system, because everybody they talk to either refers them to someone else, or refuses to engage even to the point of doing that. Sometimes associated with hypochondria, a closely related diagnosis that focuses on common symptoms of human ping-pong ball syndrome including frustration, aggressiveness, independent research, self-diagnosis, and medication-seeking behaviors.
Human ping-pong ball syndrome typically happens when a person’s problems either can’t be identified with a particular area of medical practice, or when an area of practice doesn’t exist for them. Chronic pain is one of the most common causes. Anything that happens to a person who also has a drug addiction is another. Oh, the list goes on and on, so I’m sure you already know what I’m talking about.
Did you assume that you know what my medical issues are? That, too, is part of human ping-pong ball syndrome. By the way, I hate opiates, alcohol, and all the rest of it. Always have, so if you’re waiting for that “A-ha, she IS an addict” moment, you’ll be waiting for a minute. My actual diagnosis is fibromyalgia, but that isn’t particularly relevant to what I’m talking about right now.
My daughter has a very different kind of diagnosis and a very different experience. When she falls through the cracks in the healthcare system, it’s for a different reason - because her illness is genetic, and has direct or indirect impacts on every system of the body. And the healthcare system is designed around the assumption that tough problems can be handled by focusing on a specific area of the body, which just isn’t true with genetic diseases. Never ever, as far as I know, although some may fit better into the systems approach than others.
When I was 13, we had a required health class that taught (among other things) the systems of the body. Cardiovascular, respiratory, nervous, endocrine, digestive, reproductive, muscular, skeletal, integumentary, urinary, lymphatic… well, I don’t remember exactly how many they told us there were or how it was carved up, but it was something like that. We were taught this as absolute truth, we weren’t taught that it was just one of many ways of categorizing or thinking about the body. We were taught that this was the scientific way of thinking about the body.
I think of myself as a science-minded person. I’m into evidence base and open-minded inquiry and critical thinking - like, HEAVILY into them. And when I take that perspective towards how the body systems have been taught every time I’ve encountered them, I think, “That’s bad science. Poorly executed science.” NOT the body systems themselves, which are extremely useful, but very specifically the way that they are TAUGHT. Because that’s been my experience, I’m going to say this again (then brace myself for the blowback): Systems are just one way of categorizing the body. Categorizing elements of the body by function. Compare to chakras, for example, which are based on the idea that things that are close together in the body can be categorized together. A perfectly valid approach, that is backed by millennia of medical inquiry that built up medical knowledge based on that foundation. And yet I know of many people who easily assume that chakras are “unscientific” without trying to understand them or their history first.
As it happens, my first required class in physical science was that same year, when I was 13. So I learned the periodic table around the same time I learned the systems of the body. And guess what - our teacher for physical science said, “This is just one way of organizing the elements. This is just how we think about and talk about the elements. There could be others.” So you tell me - did I just have a better teacher that year for physical science than I did for health science? Has this changed in the meanwhile, ‘cause I was 13 quite a while ago? Or are my daughter and I falling through the cracks because of flaws in the healthcare system that start with how bright-eyed future doctors are taught the systems of the body in middle school? Remember, I’m into open-minded inquiry, so I’m asking because I really want to know. Please leave your thoughts in the comments section below.
