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The duty to be happy
The French intellectual Pascal Bruckner casts a critical eye on happiness in his newly translated book, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy. Much of what he has to say about happiness applies...
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Robots dispense drugs and remove prostates
Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, speaks of the “age of augmented humanity.” If we let computers do the things they do well, this will free up humans to be better at the things they do well. “The...
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Are the most heavily marketed drugs the least beneficial?
In a perfect world, doctors would not prescribe – and patients would not take – drugs that do more harm than good. But it’s complicated. The benefits and harms of drugs are determined in randomized,...
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From healthism to overdiagnosis
In his new book, Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health, Dr. H. Gilbert Welch enumerates how the cutoff points that determine whether a patient should be treated for a disease –...
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There’s more to life than the pursuit of health
A few quotations on attitudes towards the pursuit health: And do you not hold it disgraceful to require medical aid, unless it be for a wound, or an attack of illness incidental to the time of year, —...
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Why is it so hard to reduce US health care costs?
Professor Victor Fuchs and Dr. Arnold Milstein, both of Stanford University, have an article in a recent issue of The New England Journal of Medicine that asks: Why is it so difficult to reduce health...
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What is healthism? (part one)
Throughout history there’s been an understandable desire to find connections between our behavior and our health. Human beings have practiced health regimens involving diet, exercise and hygiene since...
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What is healthism? (part two)
In part one of this post I explained the most common meaning of healthism (an excessive preoccupation with healthy lifestyles and feeling personally responsible for our health) and described an...
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On healthism, the social determinants of health, conformity, & embracing the...
It’s always hard to be sure about these things, but I think the reason I decided to take a ‘sabbatical’ from blogging last July was that I was interested in too many seemingly unrelated topics. Writing...
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On healthism, the social determinants of health, conformity, & embracing the...
Continued from part one, where I discussed the first three of my six interests: healthism, medicalization, and psychological and physical conformity. Click on the graphic below to see a larger image....
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On healthism, the social determinants of health, conformity, & embracing the...
Continued from parts one and two, where I defined the terms used in the following diagram of my blogging interests. Click on the graphic for a larger image. If I had written the previous two posts a...
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On healthism, the social determinants of health, conformity, & embracing the...
Continued from parts one, two, and three. A year ago, when I decided to call my declining rate of blogging a ‘sabbatical,’ I wrote down some questions to explore while I took time off to read. How did...
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Medical screening, overdiagnosis, and the motives of for-profit hospitals
Image by @spleenal (Nigel Auchterlounie), who blogs at Spleenal [I don’t seem to be able to display that image anymore, but here’s a link to what I’m talking about.] This superb graphic was created to...
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When health was something we could simply “forget about”
I came across the following sentence in The Positive Thinkers, a book originally published in 1965. It strikes me as a good example of how the meaning of health has changed. (emphasis added) Health is...
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Reading Notes #1: Health care inequities. Overdiagnosis. The Doctor/Patient...
What follows are items I found interesting in magazines I’ve recently read. Normally I would have tweeted these links, but since I was on vacation from Twitter (see My Twitter vacation), I decided to...
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US healthcare: Atul Gawande has some good news
Back in June of 2009, when Congress was just beginning to formulate and debate the Affordable Care Act, Atul Gawande wrote an article on the rising (and exorbitant) cost of US health care. He focused...
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