When I was recovering from one surgery, I was kept in a very well maintained ward in the hospital, but it was very sterile and temperature controlled without life to it. I don't know how you would do it without taking too much space, but it would have been nice to have some greenery to look at as I was pacing up and down the hall per doctor's orders.
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2026
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That's called the "milieu" which is just a fancy term for the general vibe of the therapeutic environment.
And yeah, hospitals SUCK at that. They'd never let actual greenery in the units because of their potential to harbor bugs or trigger allergies, but the plain/sterile look of everything makes it feel pretty alien to most patients.
Pediatric hospitals are the only ones that get it right - the walls are colorful and filled with happy imagery; the ceiling lights often have inserts that make them look like little patches of blue sky and clouds.
Idk why hospitals that care for adults always look so damn depressing. That'd be a great project idea, to get some pediatric hospital interior decorators to do their thing in other facilities!
Why do our hospitals look so bleak? We could have greener hospitals like Khoo Teck Puat or Ng Teng Fong, both in Singapore
Khoo Teck Puat hospital as an example:
Designed to be ‘forest-like’, water features with aquatic species, and plants that attract birds and butterflies were introduced. Greenery extended from the central courtyard to upper levels of the buildings and down into the open-to-sky basement, creating the impression of architecture deeply enmeshed in a garden. At the upper levels, balconies with scented plants bring the experience to the patient’s bedside.
Total surface area of horizontal and vertical greenery is almost four times the size of the land that the hospital sits on. In addition, 18% of the hospital’s floor area account for blue-green spaces and 40% of all such spaces are publicly accessible
[...] Common areas such as the main lobby and public corridors were specially designed for optimal natural ventilation thereby reducing the need for mechanical ventilation and energy consumption. By orientating the subsidized ward tower to ‘capture’ the prevailing North and South East winds, an optimal wind speed is achieved which would provide adequate thermal comfort for the patients.
[...] It is also a serves as a tranquil communal node where the local community can attend public lectures, exhibitions or participate in educational programs organized by the hospital.²
The energy-efficient design reduces energy costs by 50% and provides 40% of the floor area with the potential for natural ventilation.³
Video format about it for those that prefer it:
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=Jw1b_SviPyU&t=275s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw1b_SviPyU&t=275s
You probably won't be able to redesign/retrofit everything, but perhaps just a little bit more green instead of only concrete?
Prevention. The fewer people coming through the hospital, the less waste generated. If someone comes in with a problem that can be solved permanently (e.g. type 2 diabetes), solve it the first time so that they won't be back.
@Murse open source medical devices are a huge step, lowering cost and spreading access. OpenFlexure is a great example.
There will be a conference in Bulgaria this year about the future of medicine from a sociological perspective, I know some open medicine people will be there!
The open source insulin project comes to mind. It's be nice if there were more projects like that.
Prevention and natural medicine is what came to mind right away. Not the vodoo healing essence stuff but actually herbs, plants aso. Hildegard von Bingens book is a pure tressuretrove! Also native american and african healing plants that europeans discarded as "useless weeds" are finally being studied more for that reason
I think in existing hospitals the biggest potential for small Solarpunk efforts is around visitors (family members etc.). Another topic could be food preparation for patients.
the most visible example of solarpunk praxis I'm seeing is visitors wearing respirators to keep their loved ones safe from COVID and also the other patients. people forget that being hospitalized is an immunocompromising condition to be in.
My mom works in a care home for seniors and one thing she’s done is asked residents about their entertainment needs and tried to bring in book/magazines that they like to stock the rec room. Probably not super useful at a regular hospital with more temporary stays.
In my area someone also organizes community care days for our unhoused populations. These consist in recruiting a bunch of local people willing to share their skills (haircuts, vaccines, medical consultation, painting nails, grooming or medical attention for pets, etc). They also rent mobile shower units. Since you can’t just go into the park and practice medicine by yourself the medical staff for these events come through a local non-profit that has done the necessary paperwork for insurance and stuff. These events sometimes draw people who are hesitant to visit the hospital for various reasons but would like to ask about a medical issue they’ve been experiencing.
I’ll try to think of more things. I agree the industry has tons of people who care deeply about other people and who would love to improve conditions (both for patients and workers).
I'm afraid hospitals are systemically and ideologically incompatible with solar punk.
getting together with other medics and starting neighborhood clinics however would be much easier than attempting reform from the inside.
also stuff like DIY medicine, it would help me greatly as a trans person if medics stopped policing medical knowledge and taught us their skills instead. the idea that medicine can only be safe if practiced with a license is one that's getting countless trans people killed because we're denied the autonomy to save ourselves. the major example is DIY estrogen being safe but most doctors would tell me succumbing to a dysphoria-induced suicide is the healthier option
"medics" are so hellbent on restricting acces behind licences because so many people want to heal your cancer by injecting hydrogen peroxide into your veins and call it "alternative medicine" you would never believe.
also stuff like DIY medicine, it would help me greatly as a trans person if medics stopped policing medical knowledge and taught us their skills instead.
The problem there is that the skills and knowledge go hand-in-hand, and something being safe vs not is dependent on it being used correctly. If you're encountering reluctance from medical folks to give you DIY resources, it's most likely from the fear of giving you advice that'll turn around and fuck you up. And we don't want to fuck you up. But as you mentioned, the longer term consequences (suicide) potentially far exceed fucking up a shot... like degradation of your subcutaneous tissue because something that was supposed to be injected intramuscular was erroneously injected into the fat, causing it to break down and leaving you with a nasty pit (clinically minor, but disfiguring). Or failing to instruct you to sanitize the stopper and your injection site with alcohol pads, leading to necrotizing fasciitis, (which can kill you).
All that said, I agree with you - you're more than capable of understanding those risks and taking the time to learn both the skills and the knowledge to mitigate them. Whether or not to take that risk is solely up to you. What I'd advise is to take a deep dive into literally every step of the process: The DIY guide you found said to use one needle to draw the solution and another one to inject... why? With an inch and a half needle... why? that's a 27 gauge... why? Says inject it into your thigh... why? At a 90* angle... why? What do you do if something goes wrong? How can you even tell if something's gone wrong? You get the gist. The skill of actually giving a shot is the easy part - understanding the 'why' gets crazy complicated.
Numbers and such pulled out of my ass - I don't know squat about estrogen, so real instructions will almost certainly be different. But if you're doing it DIY, you really do need to become your own nurse. (and if that stuff comes naturally to you, get your ass into nursing school!!).
Having never given estrogen before, I'm pretty sure you already know more about it than I do, but if any of your DIY instructions seem odd or even wrong, feel free to bounce it off me and I'd be happy to share what insight I have.
. If you’re encountering reluctance from medical folks to give you DIY resources, it’s most likely from the fear of giving you advice that’ll turn around and fuck you up. And we don’t want to fuck you up.
I'm sorry, but this is just naive. Many hospitals and doctors refuse to offer HRT based solely on self-identification even though WPATH acknowledges that it is just as safe as a psychological gatekeeping track.
And when HRT is provided, trans men are trusted to do testosterone injections bybthe same hospitals that require trans women to visit a GP for estrogen injections even though both are equally risk-prone. Anti-androgens can be more complicated, but that too can be taught in an hour.
Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of trans people across the world take pharmaceuticals from illegal and semi-legal suppliers with no bad batches that I've heard of. Like with addictive drugs, illegal suppliers tend to know their stuff.
Perhaps you've rationalized your fear at trans DIY as concern about people fucking up, but when and where that fear is applied is simply inconsistent, and systematically disempowers and provides worse service to trans people, women, people of color, and other minorities.
What people in medicine are afraid of is empowering minorities. Concern for our wellbeing if we were to be empowered is just the language to justify that feeling.
I'm not saying you're deliberately setting out to be discriminatory, just that the medical culture has taught you to have a different gut reaction to a cis man regulating his own medication than to a trans nonbinary person doing the same.
Previous poster specified "medics" which I understood as the people on the actual units providing care; and their reluctance to teach skills without the foundation of knowledge that enables those skills. My take was to put myself in their shoes and consider why - the very obvious answer being that doing so can cause harm. The number of bigots working the front lines is of course higher than zero, but also a very clear minority, so jumping to that as the answer to why they behave a certain way around trans people is not correct.
You're getting more into all the bullshit that influences healthcare at the systemic level: administration, politics, religion... and your right, the answers there get a lot more nefarious, but are very much not the people the previous poster or I was discussing.
My take was to put myself in their shoes and consider why
This is called "rationalization". People are very good at finding reasonable whys when they go looking for them, in a way that correlates very weakly to actual reality.
The number of bigots working the front lines is
If you think it takes bigotry to personally partake in systemic discimination, that is dangerous, and you will hurt people because of it.
If you care about people around you, especially if they are women or minorities, please read up on intersectionality, soft discrimination, microaggression, etc. Or better yet talk about it with friends and comrades.
These are all theory to describe lived experiences that are common sense once you empathize with the person who is a minority rather than with the nurse denying them medical aid.
edit to add: And to be clear, I'm not saying you're a bigot. The whole point is that you don't need to be a bigot to act discriminatory. Empathy for minorities (and people in general) is a constant practice, especially because every minority (and person) is different so the way society has taught us to disciminate against them is different. We all constantly need to unlearn stuff, and the sooner you start the better.
I agree. Solar punk is about healing the sick world and sick society that's making us sick so we don't need health care the same way we do now, using more toxic chemicals to attack the things all the toxic chemicals and hateful attitudes did to us to destroy our mental health and our bodies to make us so sick so frequently.
hey, sounds like you're coming from a mad pride perspective based on the "toxic chemicals" rhetoric.
as a mad person myself, I don't believe using unscientific language like that helps us achieve liberation. whether something is toxic depends on dosage, circumstance and context. for example, regardless if estrogen saved my life, administering it to a trans man in the same dosage I use would probably kill him. can you see how me calling a certain medicine toxic because it killed someone even would be taking things out of context?
chemicals are value-neutral, and making this association between something being chemical and something being harmful and "artificial" can easily lead to ableist policy like MAHA.
thank you for reading thus far and hopefully this is not taken as an attack on you ❤️
I appreciate your clarification, I have no idea what "mad pride" or "mad person" means if that is some kind of acronym or has some meaning other than "angry", I have no particular organized agenda besides being "mad" in the sense of "angry at the state of the world" and while I might have been a bit loose and uninformed with terminology but I specifically had in mind chemotherapy where toxic chemicals are used to kill the rapidly-growing cancer cells faster than they kill the not-so-fast growing healthy cells.
Hopefully that clears things up although it probably just makes it more confusing. I have no idea. I'm just shouting aimlessly into the void most days. Sorry.
but I specifically had in mind chemotherapy where toxic chemicals are used to kill the rapidly-growing cancer cells faster than they kill the not-so-fast growing healthy cells.
Even if we had pristine environments and only healthy food, cancer will still occur quite frequently. I of course support researching more effective cancer treatments than we currently have (and what we do have should be free to anyone who needs it), but until better options are available, chemotherapy, as awful as it can be, can be very effective depending on the specific cancer, and has spared many a horrible death despite it being a poison itself.
We would condemn tens of thousands to a slow death if we were to cast aside toxic chemotherapy without an adequate replacement that has proven itself.
If you talk to your rehab department and find a newer occupational therapist, they've been trained to look at things from a systems-and-how-they-interact perspective to bridge the gap between what someone wants to accomplish and what they have already accomplished. They've probably already grumbled about some of the inefficiencies you're looking to identify and tackle to themselves and could be open to collaborating to address them.
Chinese medicine focuses on the interconnectedness of the body and uses yin yang, and the five elements as a foundation for understanding. Organs has a relationship with each other similar to how our emotions has a relationship with each other.
So you want to just vibe your cancer out?
Obviously you don't want an answer given the tone.