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> I’m disabled and became disabled as an adult and, in my experience, after becoming disabled I’ve faced rampant discrimination that wasn’t there before. I’ve been fired twice in the last 10 years due to disability-related issues. I have no recourse, anything I could do would risk torpedoing my career. This is life under the medical model. You’re expected to live a smaller existence.

For what it is worth, I'm probably in different countries to you, and "me too". I fractured T8 and spent some time unable to walk at all and in a wheelchair -- I can now use a crutch some of the time and have a fairly complex medical history.

You never notice how much [en-gb] pavements / [en-us] sidewalks camber towards the road for drainage until moving your pelvis is excruciating, or driving a manual wheelchair on a camber means that you're constantly working twice as hard with one hand compared to the other. Nor do you notice what a bin on the street does when kerbs are difficult. Low hanging vegetation, normally pretty, over a neighbour's wall becomes incredibly annoying if you literally cannot move yourself to avoid it inevitably hitting your eyes. So many minor annoyances, from booked assistance on train travel forgetting you exist halfway through, right the way through to outright discrimination from your colleagues. And don't get me started on the bladder management!

Everyone could be disabled, and as said earlier at some point in life everyone probably would be. Inclusive design is just that -- inclusive -- and done correctly it costs nothing to little extra. I don't really understand why we don't build it into society, rather than try to get people to (as I increasingly want to) fork out thousands to tens of thousands for electric wheelchairs. Sure, they're great, but sometimes I miss taking long walks or cycling ('normally').

I am so thankful that I just deal with chronic pain and not mobility issues as well. I’m sorry.

Even though it doesn’t affect me directly I’ve started to notice places where mobility accommodation sucks. In a sense it’s a canary: mobility is the most visible category disability to able-bodied folks and if our society can’t be bothered to help folks like you, god help us who have “invisible” illnesses.

Those both skirt around the correct way to think about it, which is the costs way.there are extra costs associated with having a disability. the two models you propose are the disabled person pays or everyone else pays. Everyone else pays is not the correct model because it coerces people into mazsive costs that dont necessarily make sense for them. Disabled person pays isnt correct either because there are many near zero cost things we could do if we just thought about it at design phase. There should be ahealthier middle ground that routinely gets the cheap stuff done and leaves an easy path for the expensive stuff without coercing spending

> Disabled person pays isnt correct either because there are many near zero cost things we could do if we just thought about it at design phase.

??? This is the social model on a nutshell.

No it isn't because it isn't cast in cost/opportunity cost/etc. The reality of implementation is top down dictation without apparent consideration of cost (For example, I redid the front door of our office and I now have two buttons to open the automatic door that look like crap and are at waist height and at the floor. This was dictated in the code in my region as a new concession that I never would have done because it is broadly stupid in my context.) Maybe highly cost sensitive and more optional social model would be a better description.

Are you the disabled person using these automatic door buttons? If not, have you asked someone with a mobility-related disability what they think of it?

It’s absolutely possible for laws around accommodations to be stupid. Once again, that’s the medical model, when able-bodied people write policy for disabled people, there are stupid outcomes. The social model says that there should always be a person with a relevant disability involved with designing accommodations unless it’s absolutely impossible to do. The saying commonly used in the community is “nothing about us without us.”

So perhaps your implementation sucks, but if it does, there’s a good chance it’s because of the medical model.

lets say I think the correct model is the social model which then has every change priced vs the cost of not changing it (cost incurred changing it > cost incurred to disabled persons). That's probably a reasonable approximation you can internalize. I am also skeptical of your second paragraph. I think that's just how government works except in a very few spots with some characteristic that drives better behaviour (I think social cohesion or very limited government being the main qualities that can drive better outcomes but I'm not willing to outline why because this is already too long) Everybody ass covers and you get an explosion of stuff in favour of the loud people that harm the majority more than the loud people benefit, which is deadweight loss to society and everyone is worse off. Loud people being the place holder for people complaining, of which disabled people are a tiny minority.

> Under the social model, we ask all able-bodied people to accommodate disabled individuals instead.

This sounds good in the abstract, but the devil is in the details. What specific accommodation is being asked for? What counts as a disability? For example, should I simply have to ignore angry outbursts directed at me and my coworkers from someone with oppositional defiance disorder[1]? Am I supposed to take someone's word that they have ODD or can I request proof from a medical professional?

There are real tradeoffs here. You see it in how these kinds of accommodations are abused at elite universities[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppositional_defiant_disorder

[2] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/12/8/harvard-undergr...

I mean you kinda are just expected to ignore angry outbursts directed at you from anyone. That's not even about disability, it's just part of the social contract that you don't start throwing blows when people yell at you.

This is really ignorant. That’s not an insult exactly, I mean that you’re asking questions that all have answers if you cared to look them up.

The reason why people call that sort of attitude “ableist” is that you’re requiring me, the disabled person, to prove that I’m not a liar.

> What specific accommodation is being asked for?

There is a whole field of study called “Disability Theory” that includes this topic. It is well-defined with thousands of pages written on the topic. It is not nebulous, you just aren’t familiar with it.

> What counts as a disability?

Words have definitions:

“the condition of being unable to perform as a consequence of physical or mental unfitness”

> Am I supposed to take someone's word that they have ODD

Yes, but a person with ODD is still expected to be a decent human. They may make more often mistakes but they should recognize and apologize for those mistakes. They should be in therapy to help learn self-regulation techniques.

Likewise, you should give them some extra grace because, in spite of all that extremely hard work, it’s hard to ignore what your body is telling you (push back against authority) and sometimes they will slip up.

> can I request proof from a medical professional?

I dunno, can I get a video of your last colonoscopy? Can you tell the public internet if you take take viagra? Can you list your mental health disorders for me please? How’s your gut, had any diarrhea lately?

Medical information is private.

> There are real tradeoffs here.

Yes, the tradeoffs are that things are a bit less convenient for able-bodied people and disabled people get to actually have agency on their lives.

This is a bit of fallacy of relative privation. No need to fix it all. We can all be considerate in the areas we have control over and as a society have basics like ramps etc.

I support the medical model then, disabled people who can't work should, ought, to be among the poorest in society, just above the people that can work but don't. Because some people have to be the relatively poor compared to the rest (in absolute terms though: you are richer than almost anyone alive in year 800 CE so not starving poor nor barely surviving poor) and so, who should be? Should the able working be poorer than a disabled person doing less work? The same work?

And why should disabled people be able to craft policy that will be funded largely by the abled? In order to have legitimacy of a policy, you need to involve the people that will pay for it.

The social model is non-sensical, it's unfair, and it cloaks its unfairness in the language of social justice which it doesn't deserve to. There are better forms of advocacy.

May you someday experience the same lack of empathy you're broadcasting here.

> some people have to be the relatively poor compared to the rest

Why? And not why in terms of a trivial statistical tautology, where a bell curve has to have a left tail. Why, in terms of, what downstream causal effect of deliberately maintaining large cohorts of poor people accomplishes something desirable?

The cynic in me says that the visible presence of people dying on the street is very much intended to send a message, "work hard or this will be your fate".

I wouldn't entirely call that cynicism considering a lot of people just come out and say it.