Tired of battling pain and neuropathy after her bilateral total knee replacement, my eighty-two-year-old mother finally said she wanted to see an orthopedic. I arranged everything, got her into a rickshaw, and we made our way to the clinic she had long believed would be the answer to her suffering.
The doctor, absorbed in the election results on his mobile, examined and asked her a few routine questions, dismissed her concerns, and prescribed her for two weeks. As we were about to leave, he reminded us to show him the purchased medicines.
The real blow came at the pharmacy: four thousand five hundred rupees for a week’s supply. My mother walked out defeated, returning to the same private struggle she had hoped to escape. And that moment marked the beginning of her own makeshift, do-it-yourself (DIY) path through healthcare.
Within weeks, the doorbell became a constant soundtrack. Foot massagers arrived, and then joint exercisers and posture devices. An assortment of gadgets, all promising relief, one after another. She drew up her own food lists, restrictions, and routines with surprising discipline. She doubled down on yoga and breathing practices she had followed for years, now treating them as medical obligations. And instead of turning to YouTube, she pulled out my grandfather’s old war manual, searching for the structured routines that once defined his life.
What seemed like personal eccentricity turned out to be something far more common. The shift toward devices, routines, manuals, and self-fashioned systems mirrored something I was beginning to see everywhere. At a bank recently, I overheard two older men discussing their orthopedic’s advice – just quadriceps exercises and how they had devised their own ways to manage their conditions at home.
Why are people turning away from the system?
The more people I spoke to, the clearer the trend became: many were quietly drifting away from formal healthcare and patching together treatment systems on their own. Not because they preferred it, but because they increasingly felt cornered into it. The trend is inspired by a shortage of doctors, long waiting times for appointments, and the increasing prevalence of chronic diseases.
Online tutorials and wellness influencers offered simple solutions that doctors didn’t have time to explain. Ayurveda-based nutrition plans gained traction as people sought alternatives to pharmaceutical interventions. Family wisdom is being rediscovered. New technologies give people confidence to self-navigate their health in ways previous generations never could.
This shift offers real benefits- greater autonomy, less dependence on overloaded hospitals, and a focus on prevention. But the risks loom large. I’ve watched people misdiagnose themselves, delay essential care, create entire belief systems around supplements and gadgets they half-understand. A silent suffering class is emerging, people who avoid formal care entirely.
As for my mother, is she recovering? Sort of. She’s managing. She’s found her own way through, not the cure she hoped for, but a system she can control. And that’s what DIY healthcare really offers: not solutions, but the illusion of an agency in a system that offers so little of it, the faint feeling of steering a ship no one else seems willing to captain.
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