Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

Even General Mills, which dates back to the nineteenth century, has added meditation rooms to its buildings, finding that a seven-week course produces striking results: [Eighty-three] per cent of participants said they were “taking time each day to optimise my personal productivity”—up from 23 per cent before the course. Eighty-two per cent said th

A cynic might conclude that preventive medicine exists to transform people into raw material for a profit-hungry medical-industrial complex.

Everything we experience subjectively, every thought and emotion, produces at least transient physiological changes in the brain.

Overdiagnosis is beginning to be recognized as a public health problem, and is sometimes referred to as an “epidemic.”

Never mind that poverty, race, and occupation play a huge role in determining one’s health status, the doctrine of individual responsibility means that the less-than-fit person is a suitable source not only of revulsion but resentment. The objection raised over and over to any proposed expansion of health insurance was, in so many words: Why should

If a medical procedure has no demonstrable effect on a person’s physiology, then how should that procedure be classified? Clearly it is a ritual, which can be defined very generally as a “solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order.”1 But rituals can also have intangible psychological effects, so the

Early anthropologists could have called the healing practices of so-called primitive peoples “health care,” but they took pains to distinguish the native activities from the purposeful interventions of Euro-American physicians. The latter were thought to be rational and scientific, while the former were “mere” rituals, and the taint of imperialist

When the vacation is over they can return to their regimens of self-mastery and control.

There is nothing about ourselves that is not potentially subject to our control.