Drugs for Life

Abstract

A doctor tells his patient, "Your blood pressure is off the chart, you're overweight, out of shape, and your cholesterol is god-awful.In short I find you perfectly normal."A doctor tells his patient, "the good news is that your cholesterol level hasn't gone up. the bad news is the guidelines have changed."t hese two jokes are both funny, and their intersection points to a new kind of health, one in which to be normal is to have symptoms and risk factors you should worry about, and at the same time to not know whether you should be worrying about yet more things.In fact, to not worry about your health, to not know as much as you can about it, and to not act on that knowledge is to be irresponsible.Some public relations campaigns feature people who are the "picture of health" but yet warn, "You might look and feel fine, but you need to get the inside story" (fig.1).It appears to be that feeling healthy has become a sign that you need to be careful and go in for screening.To be normal, therefore, is to be insecure: this is the subject of my book.Health in America today is defined by this double insecurity: never being sure enough about the future-always being at risk-and never knowing enough about what you could and should be doing.Paradoxically, the insecurity continues to grow despite there being an equal growth in research about risks, screening, and treatments and constant growth in the amount of medicine consumed each year-as Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.

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