healthCARE? The symptoms of challenges to the healthcare system may point to the cure

A recent experience with the healthcare system surely highlighted its challenges! Of course the hope is the symptoms may point to the cure. My elderly Aunt, still bright but wheelchair bound and in fairly constant pain after surgery, is in a nursing home situation. I recently went there for a "care conference" - as well as to visit with her, of course. Or at least the 'of course' was apparent to me, that there was and is a person to be cared for and about; the tone of the conference was all about "management." Things are managed, people give and receive care. My Aunt was sitting outside when I arrived. She gave a pale smile but no more –her spark and spirit were flickering. For the first time ever, I just couldn’t ‘reach’her. At the conference her physical therapist talked about how she ‘Just didn’t try' and how she ‘seemed to like being yelled at.' I'd mentioned to this therapist earlier that Aunt Cammie had suffered, physically, from the withdrawal of some of the medication she’s been talking -one side effect was shakiness, surely problematical to someone trying to relearn how to walk. The therapist had said privately that she too had withdrawn from those same meds and she that knew how hard it was. We began to discern that the point of the meeting was to conclude that our Aunt should not maintain her apartment (which the nursing home could rent out for many times the price she paid for it long ago), but move permanently to the Health Center. The therapist kept silent about the experience she shared with my Aunt. There seemed no room at the conference for the personal, only for institutional needs. No room for, well, ‘care’. I had arranged for a local acupuncturist to visit later, as my Aunt had enjoyed and benefited from such treatment in the past. When Steve arrived we wheeled Aunt Cammie up to her apartment, sneakily : we’d have had to justify and approve an acupuncturist’s presence to the authorities down in the health center wing. He chose not to use needles at all with her, but a gentle style of acupressure. Under his quiet care I saw color return to Aunt Cammie’s face, tears come to her eyes, saw her shift to a position of much more ease in her chair. Steve was unaffected, knowledgeable, personal with her. Finishing, he asked, 'How are you now? Was that good ?' Aunt Cammie, the color back in her beautiful eyes, looked him straight in his and said 'Yes. It was good.' Steve, perhaps catching her personality, went on, 'Are you being honest? Or charming?' and she said 'Honest' and then, with a heartening return of her eternal flirt, '..And charming!' I know how when I am treated as less, I tend respond to expectations –as well as the reverse. Why do we cheer on our children at sporting events –isn’t it because we know that our love and hope for them have actual effect? All of the employees at the nursing home seemed to have good intentions, but these were checked at every turn by institutional concerns. They, as well as the patients, surely suffer. The acupuncturist, free of such regulation could offer real care. But if we hadn’t been able to pay him, what then? Seems to me that care for one another, our elderly in this case, could be a value held by the US community, seen not as a commodity but a necessity. 'Care conference’ –they had the wording right. Its where we need to ground the health conversation.