It does, to the average Floridian and to Ron DeSantis.

Advocating for veterans is one of few things that has the chance of appealing to Republicans.

I’d argue that saving some people from the death penalty is better than saving none at all. It will open the door in the future to fully ending the death penalty.

They really aren’t.

Try speaking to anyone with a chronic and incurable illness. Try speaking to countless women and PoC who were denied treatment at the ER. Try speaking to people who had their medications denied by pharmacist because they didn’t ‘look like they’re in pain’.

Modern medicine is rife with systemic misogyny and racism. The privilege of being heard by your doctor isn’t a universal experience. The rest of us are forced to choose between suffering and dying or educating ourselves and self-advocating.

As someone with a chronic incurable disability, I’m tired of abled bodied people deciding for us which of our experiences count as ‘evidence’ and which do not.

People have this perception of modern medicine as an infallible cure-all that isn’t saddled with systemic discrimination and neglect of women and minorities.

It doesn’t matter how effective a medication is for a certain condition or for off label use. The only thing that matters is that that clinical trials are worth the investment to pharmaceutical companies, and the people most worth investing into are those with money and the privilege of being heard by their doctors.

The rest of us can continue screaming into the void as our symptoms are dismissed and as we are treated like unreliable witnesses to our own bodies. ‘Have you tried yoga?’ ‘You just need to lose weight.’ ‘Abdominal pain? It’s just your period.’ We are treated like we aren’t trying our hardest to live with every symptom. And then when we find something that works, we are told that ‘it’s not covered by insurance’ or ‘there is no evidence that it works’ or ‘it’s just placebo’. It’s like nothing we feel in our body is true and everything we say is treated as a drugseeking lie.

Fuck the cherry picked ‘evidence’. The system is broken and chronically ill people are left to suffer.