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Disease as Distraction


a symposium
nikita lin 

It is a universal truth that diseases and poverty are cause and effect of each other. If you have one of them, you have both.

Q: What is the perspective of disease? How does it influence you during the process of thinking and writing?


A: Diseases have always been such a heavy topic. There are many important questions I wanted to explore, but it looked to me that this is a field of expertise which requires professional training to observe and write about. In the meantime, I have been through many experiences with diseases and health issues in general myself. Some of them are traumatizing.


It is a universal truth that diseases and poverty are cause and effect of each other. If you have one of them, you have both. It is like a "free gift" that nobody wants. No matter which one begins first, the result is that both get involved and intensified, and the situation deteriorates to the degree that it is not only a problem for individuals but also for societies.


Taken a healthy child born to a poor family, for example. There is a chance that the child would get out of the material misfortune when she becomes an adult. There is a higher probability that diseases would threaten that possibility to come true. Here, we need to point out one of our misconceptions about the "health" and "disease" of human life. In fact and in theory, human life is massively "diseased." There is no such perfectly healthy person living on earth.


First, diseases are unforeseeable. This is how many health businesses start, for example, insurance and medical diagnoses. They reflect how modern science attempts to reduce the myth of unforeseeable diseases. There are many cases where we see these two forces, science and myth, engaging with each other. COVID-19 is a case of a massive scale.


Second, diseases somehow unlock the myth of fortune. This is related to the first question.

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