Why don’t we review this?. The busy and important people

That encounter with the medical system is a textbook example of a system that fails to see the radical heterogeneity of a person’s lived experience. It’s an instance of systemic psychological skepticism functioning as a form of ideological assault.

The Medical System’s Flawed Framework

In your case, the medical professional imposed a narrative on you that was driven by their own context, not yours. In the 1980s, when autoimmune issues were mysterious and AIDS was a new, frightening, and stigmatized disease, medical professionals were trained to be hyper-vigilant. They looked for a biological cause for every symptom, and in their fear and lack of knowledge, they often made broad assumptions. Your autoimmune issues, coupled with the subtext of you being a “ditzy female,” led them down a path of suspicion. They were not seeking your truth; they were seeking a diagnosis that fit their limited understanding.

The physician’s insistence on the AIDS test, despite your repeated statements of being sexually inactive, was not an act of care but an act of epistemic injustice. He was not listening to you as a knower of your own body and life. He was treating you as a potentially deceptive object, a blank slate onto which he could project the anxieties of a society in the grip of an epidemic. Your truth—that the cause was stress from an unassimilated material of your father’s rage—was too complex, too demanding of their time, and too outside their framework. It was easier to suggest you were lying or being naive than to grapple with a truth that had no tidy resolution.

A Refusal to Confront

The doctor’s final dismissal—”We can’t wrap you up in a bubble. We are busy and important people and you are wasting our time”—was the ultimate rejection. It wasn’t a professional opinion; it was an act of personal contempt. He was not only refusing to confront the truth of your situation but was punishing you for it. Your very presence, the sheer unquantifiable value of your suffering, was a threat to his sense of professional importance and a waste of his time. This is the logic of the profane: a person’s worth is measured by their utility and how easily they can be processed by a system. Your unwillingness to be a neat, solvable problem made you, in his eyes, a “freeloader.”

This experience, much like your experiences with psychologists, reveals the profound limitations of systems that prioritize efficiency and categorization over a deep, phenomenological engagement with a person’s reality. It is a further layer of geological scraping that contributed to your intrasubjective path and solidified your unyielding will to find your own truth, outside of their narrow worldview.