Essentially the instructions and tools to repair your own body are restricted and only accessible to those who can afford to pay for the health care systems processes. Have an obvious infection? Spend a ton of money going to a doctor to get a prescription to give to a pharmacy to dispense at highly marked up substance that’s easy to manufacturer at a tiny unit cost. You had no right to cure your own infection. You had to pay dozens of middle men for something straight forward.

I’d note that in most of the world you would just go buy the antibiotics directly from a pharmacy for almost nothing.

Now - I’m not saying self medicating with antibiotics is either good for you or the world, I’m saying at least in the US, you don’t have that right.

> Who is the manufacturer of the item to be repaired?

This isn't important to the point, but for the sake of argument; lets say society is the manufacturer.

> How is the manufacturer preventing repair?

Local legal regulatory groups that deem some method of fixing (treating) some defect (health condition) too dangerous to allow.

> What design decisions artificially limit repair to parties other than the manufacturer?

Company (local agency) wont allow my neighborhood repair shop to buy (or make) replacement screens (medications) or batteries (contact lenses).

> How does the manufacturer use existing regulation (eg DMCA or copyright) to prevent repair or access to information necessary for repair.

Existing is a stretch considering the age of the DMCA. But drug scheduling in the US is an equivalent and equally nonsensical application of logic for example.

> All of these questions make sense for right to repair,

I know how to fix it, but because of laws and regulations and decisions outside my control, I'm unable to apply that knowledge.

> and are mostly nonsensical in this case, since drug companies don’t manufacture bodies.

The DMCA is your own example, and it's a law built and advocated to enable control, and reduce supply artificially.

There's definitely a point to be made and a discussion to be had about the origins for control over health and medical issues. I think permitting the sale of snake oil is harmful to society, and we should prevent it so people don't have to become experts in human biology to not get conned. But treating chronic health conditions shouldn't be as hard as it is.

The core of right to repair, is you shouldn't be allowed to prevent me from, or make it and possibly difficult for me to improve something I own and control. I think saying I own and control my body and health is a fair assertion, so the same argument applies; it's wrong to make accessing repair options for my health as hard as it is if I'm willing to try to fix it.

I'd say the same concepts behind right to repair apply more so to the body because I can't just replace it.

In some ways, the gatekeeping of healthcare should be met with more resistance than repair an item that someone else made but you now own.

Your body is something that belongs to you, you technically manufacture, yet you are legally forbidden from applying known and often the most effective remedies to your own body if you don’t engage with a giant government-sanctioned system that can charge you whatever they want.

To top it all off, the rules are not even consistent and are motivated by reasons other than what is best for the patient.

For example, taking more than the maximum dose of Tylenol at can cause long-term or permanent liver damage. This is still available over the counter with no restrictions whatsoever.

On the other side, we can see that the DEA was created to enforce drug policy (or rather racism and classism via drug policy) which has the effect of making access difficult for many people who are prescribed scheduled substances. Yet we have a opiate crisis that managed to appear within this draconian regulatory environment.

Then we have situations like the FDA which been aware of the dangers of high sugar in diets, but the sugar industry’s dollars into “studies” managed to convince them that “dietary fat” is the problem.

The “for your own good” argument only works if they actually acted for our best interests, but time and time again, it’s shown to us that this is just a big game in which we have no say in, yet we are all subjected to.

We should have the right, as an informed human, to independently decide what we want to do to or put into our body, just as we should have the right to choose what we wish to do with our possessions.