In danger of falling apart

I’m reading Lewis Thomas’s The Medusa and the Snail, and the other day I came across his brilliant essay entitled “The Health-Care System”:

As a people, we have become obsessed with Health.

There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body.

The new consensus is that we are badly designed, intrinsically fallible, vulnerable to a host of hostile influences inside and around us, and only precariously alive. We live in danger of falling apart at any moment, and are therefore always in need of surveillance and propping up. Without the professional attention of a health-care system, we would fall in our tracks.

This is a new way of looking at things, and perhaps it can only be accounted for as a manifestation of spontaneous, undirected, societal propaganda. We keep telling each other this sort of thing, and back it comes on television or in the weekly newsmagazines, confirming all the fears, instructing us, as in the usual final paragraph of the personal-advice columns in the daily paper, to “seek professional help.” Get a checkup. Go on a diet. Meditate. Jog. Have some surgery. Take two tablets, with water. Spring water. If pain persists, if anomie persists, if boredom persists, see your doctor….

We are, in real life, a reasonably healthy people. Far from being ineptly put together, we are amazingly tough, durable organisms, full of health, ready for most contingencies. The new danger to our well-being, if we continue to listen to all the talk, is in becoming a nation of healthy hypochondriacs, living gingerly, worrying ourselves half to death.

Amen!

(On a side note, I’m here in Vegas and just finished the first day of classes. It’s…well…boring. Probably mainly because I didn’t get much sleep last night. And sitting at a table for eight hours a day is just slightly conducive to daydreaming. But I’m a quarter of the way done! And I came up with an idea for my class project (a database) that I’m rather excited about, but more on that later. And I’d better stop this parenthetical barnacle because it’s already out of balance to this completely unrelated post. So far I haven’t had much time at all for the Internet, but I’ll try to keep up with e-mails and comments as best I can.)

I feel that we should prevent health problems, not go to the doctor to fix it. Let’s work on that.

Hi Ben,
Just wanted to drop you a line after reading your post. We humans ARE tough yet amazingly fragile.
I am a 48 year old mother of six living in Provo. I have 2 sons and a daughter attending BYU. My second son Steve Brown is a Hinckley scholar and was recently diagnosed with his second relapse of a childhood cancer called Ewing’s Sarcoma. He first got cancer at age 17 after a very healthy childhood.
Second diagnosis was half-way through freshman year at BYU. No proselyting mission for him of course, because all his time was spent hospitalized. Well he finally limped through and finished his freshman year at age 21. Amazing grades because he has an amazing brain.
However just 2 months ago cancer struck again and he is now undergoing chemo once again and stem cell transplant.
I just want to tell you life can turn on a dime and enjoy your healthy body while you have it.
Life is a gift and a blessing. You never know what challenges you will be confronted with. Sincerely, Karen

A: I agree. And even when we do have problems, I think that as a society we tend to run straight to medicine when a lot of times our bodies would take care of us. It just takes time. But of course there are plenty of cases where doctors and medicine are necessary.

Karen: Thanks for your comment — it’s good to remember that none of us is really immune from things like that. A sobering thought, to be sure.