When the Social Security Disability judge made the final decision about my case, she noted that “there is nothing in the record that shows all that trauma affects your ability to work.” She insisted that I could work full-time in a hotel linen room and, therefore, denied my claim. I was near death, in bed 20 hours a day, barely able to drink water, eat some soup, and walk to the end of the driveway. Of course, I felt slammed, but she was right about the record. None of my “healthcare” practitioners had documented my trauma or its effects on my ability to function.
Doctors keep tabs on the same tired list: height, weight, blood pressure, heart rate, and a periodic standard lab panel. These numbers are supposed to tell the story of my health, but they don’t. They overlook the daily reality of chronic pain, exhaustion, and the neurobiological toll of trauma. They fail to describe the challenges I face, the ones that shape my life every hour of every day.
When medicine relies only on these surface-level measurements, it doesn’t just fail me. It actively enables the pathocracy. Those “normal” metrics give institutions, employers, insurers, and even government agencies the excuse to overlook chronic conditions and claim people should be working, producing, and conforming. On paper, we look “fine.” In lived reality, we’re fighting to survive.
This isn’t an accident. A system built to serve profit and power is not interested in measuring the real indicators of suffering, because the cause points right back at it. Chronic illness, recurrent pain, and what’s called mental illness are the direct fallout of a world designed around exploitation, disconnection, and relentless stress. If it refuses to recognize the cause–the pathocracy itself–then we’re left trapped in its game, arguing over lab numbers that are not meant to capture our humanity. Our suffering is a feature, not a flaw, of the profit-driven machine it protects.
From a Relational Neuroscience perspective, real health isn’t measured by cholesterol counts or weight charts. It’s defined by regulation, safety, connection, and the nervous system’s ability to return to balance after stress. Without that, all the “normal” numbers in the world mean nothing.
The pathocracy thrives on erasing invisible suffering and ignoring the conditions that create it. The only way forward is to stop playing by its rules. We must insist on new measures of health that recognize the lived body, nervous system, and the root causes of harm. Until then, every time a doctor tells me my labs look “good,” I hear the system speaking through them with, “Your suffering is a political inconvenience, and we have weaponized ‘objective data’ to ensure it doesn’t count.”
And that’s exactly why we have to keep telling the truth about it.
