Can words have an effect on our health? While I can’t make the case in scientifically, I have little doubt that any body shaming language we use does unnecessary harm to our health.
Take for instant someone who refer to their good arm implying that the other one is what? Perhaps we might even say this is not my good hand or this is my bad arm. How does this constant reaffirming the inferior quality of part of our body skew our perception of yourself. It was not too long ago people who favored the left hand were corrected for not using their bodies “right” . If we look at the `word “left” itself, we think of leftovers, what’s left, they left. All uses implying some secondary nature. If we dig deeper we find the latin word for left “sinus”, which referred to a pocket on the left side of a toga morphed into the word sinister. Where this belief that left is bad and right is right came from is debated, but I suspect industrialization had role. Many products are designed with right hand use in mind. Making products for left handed individual would have meant retooling a factories. Today, we may be past shaming children into contorting to the products that were never design for them, but we are still trapped in a good hand bad hand dichotomy.
Over the summer I found myself in such a self made trap. I was trying out a new juggling trick while talking to a friend. Casually I refered to my “bad hand”. I was present enough though, to realise my mistake, and took the time to rephrase what I was trying to express without using the language of shame. No sooner had I done that, than I noticed that I can actually do many things better with my left hand than my right. While I have more precision with my right hand, it is exactly this precise control that stops it from being as fluid as my left.
Anther example of body shaming language I hear, is when somebody refers to their bad back or bad knees. I'm not exactly sure about knees, but backs are pretty old evolutionary. Vertebrates have their origins in the cambrian explosion over 500 million years ago. Whatever the bad back gene was, I’m pretty sure it been weeded out through natural selection, and please don’t say because modern humans live so much longer. We don’t. When people cite how people used to only live to 24 or whatever they are factoring in a high infant mortality rate which was certainly a problem . It has been common for people to live at least into their 60s, performing all the very physical tasks that needed to be done for well over 100,000 years.
When we refer to something such as our knee is bad we first are telling ourselves that bad is an intrinsic part of the knee. It is not of course. Our hypothetical knee can be made healthier with care or made weaker with neglect. There may be some form of permanent damage, but that too is alway i a state of becoming more or less healthy with regard to care. Furthermore people have a preference to ignore what is bad. By saying our knee in this case is bad be are priming our brain to ignore it when it most needs attention. Imagine if instead of saying we have a bum knee, we were able to say our knee has trouble going down stairs, or aches in the cold, or after eating inflammatory food. This would foster awareness of what helps and what hurts. This awareness I believe allow us to modify our lifestyles to better accommodate our individualistic needs.
To expand on this I believe one ( although certainly not only) reason for our opiod problem is that, while effective in the short term, as injuries heal they need our heightened awareness to strengthen the damage tissue without injuring it. In this time when we should be most attuned with our bodies taking something to dull our sensational can make it that much easier to engage in activities that are damaging, creating a feedback loop. That not to say to say I’m anti pain medication, which goes back at least as much as written medical records. Rather I believe once we are done treating the pain we should start treating our bodies.
In closing , I hope this bring about more awareness to how we talk about our bodies. I hope this does not just bring out another layer of shame. . If you do find yourself talking about your bad arm or your bad back, please don’t use that to get upset with yourself. I have found taking a moment to rephrase, and create a new neural pathway in the brain is the best way to retrain yourself from this habit.