Few white-collar people understand the degree to which manual labor chews up workers’ bodies"
Life in the Sickest Town in AmericaI drove from one of the healthiest counties in the country to the least-healthy, both in the same state. Here’s what I learned about work, well-being, and happiness.
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Just about everyone I spoke with at the Grundy clinic was a former manual worker, or married to one, and most had a story of a bone-crushing accident that had left them (or their spouse) out of work forever. For Rose, who came from the nearby town of Council, that day came in 1996, when he was pinned between two pillars in his job at a sawmill. He suffered through work until 2001, he told me, when he finally started collecting “his check,” as it’s often called. He had to go to a doctor to prove that he was truly hurting—he has deteriorating discs, he says, and chronic back pain. He was turned down twice, he thinks because he was just 30 years old at the time. Now the government sends him a monthly check for $956.
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But visiting a place like Grundy reveals a more complicated picture. There are undoubtedly some who exaggerate their ailments in order to collect their checks. But many of the coal workers here have experienced horrific on-the-job accidents and can’t go back to the mines. Other residents have been battered by diabetes, obesity, and tobacco. Others still suffer from severe depression and intellectual disabilities that would preclude most kinds of work. And most importantly, there are no other options here: no orthodontist’s office where someone can work the front desk; no big firms brimming with entry-level secretarial jobs. It’s not even clear how a person would go about calling around for a job here: My iPhone stopped working a few miles outside the county line.
Few white-collar people understand the degree to which manual labor chews up workers’ bodies. And in Grundy, there’s nowhere for them to go afterward.
“Here you have a Pandora's box of every social issue that might contribute to disability,” said Martin Wegbreit, the director of litigation at the Central Virginia Legal Aid Society. Before coming to Richmond in 2004, Wegbreit worked in southwest Virginia for nearly 20 years.
“These are jobs that even if they don't injure people, they wear people down,” he told me. “It's hard on the back, it's hard on the knees, it's hard on the entire body.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/01/life-in-the-sickest-town-in-america/384718/
Waiting for free health care from remote area medical
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my anthropology class spent a couple days in Kentucky.
We went down in a coal mine. I was a caver at the time, but I was still freaked out big time. The noise of the coal creaking above us...the smells, the noise.
I'm 5'3" and the ceiling was barely over my head. No idea how the big guys down there did it (though most were pretty short).
And if you ever go down in a coal mine, and then blow your nose when you come out - it is pure black.
And we were down about an hour. 
In which a pathologist holds up a large shred of blackened tissue with a pair of tweezers and says this is what is left of a dead coal miner's lung. Miners endure until they're disabled enough to collect disability, and by then it's too late to restore their health. Then they're begrudged that measly check. 
