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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there’s a darker, more menacing side to the preoccupation with fitness, and this is the widespread suspicion that if you can’t control your own body, you’re not fit, in any sense, to control anyone else, and in their work lives that is a large part of what typical gym-goers do.

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