Health Articles

Details: Ben Fuchs

If you’re one of the hundreds of millions of Americans who've gotten a prescription this year, you probably noticed that the text was illegible. And not because of the doctor’s calligraphy. Even typewritten scripts are impossible to understand. That’s because they’re written in Latin. Hmm…now isn’t that interesting. Does your doctor or your pharmacist speak Latin? Probably not. So, what could possibly be the purpose of writing instructions and details for something as important, potent and very dangerous in an ancient language that is not only arcane and inscrutable, but that hasn’t even been spoken commonly for 2000 years?

Details: Ben Fuchs

Yum cholesterol, eat up! Despite the fact that for decades doctors have demonized cholesterol as a molecular monster, these days the conventional understanding has changed. Earlier this year the United Sates Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee reversed its longstanding words of wisdom about avoiding egg yolks, shrimp, lobster and other cholesterol containing foods, proclaiming that the much-maligned substance is “…no longer a nutrient of concern”. No longer a nutrient of concern? Great, it’s about time! But what’s missing from the lifting of the medical and social stigma associated with eating cholesterol-containing foods is some actual love for what the under-appreciated biochemical really is and what it does to keep the body healthy.

Cholesterol is an anabolic (building) chemical. It plays an important role in the production of the hormones of youth, fertility, and growth. Its mere presence tells the body that anti-aging and repair can proceed and its production is stimulated by stress and tissue breakdown, which, in just the right amount, functions as growth signals. This partially accounts for our societal tendency to have higher blood cholesterol levels than we actually need. Our cultural inclinations to long term chronic stress and degenerative diseases, along with high blood sugar and insulin (there’s a reason that diabetes and elevated blood cholesterol go hand-in-hand), not to mention the physiological burden of nutritional deficiencies, are the ultimate cause of elevated cholesterol and the real bad guys in the epic decades-long drama called “CHOLESTEROL-MANIA”.

Details: Ben Fuchs

You may not have heard of it, but the term medicalization is so significant and relevant it has its own Wikipedia entry. Around since the 1970’s, the word applies to the process of regarding as much of human life as grist for the medical model mill as possible, to essentially control as much of human life as possible, using drugs and devises and doctors and medical procedures and make lots of lucre while doing it. It can be construed as a type of social manipulation that attempts to enforce and superimpose so-called standards and thereby “normalize” the wide ranging spectrum human activities which are, diverse, idiosyncratic and often based on nothing more than the unique nature of personal preference and individual biochemistry.

One of the problems with the medicalization of everyday life (that’s the title of a book of essays by the medical writer and psychiatrist Dr. Tomas Szaz) is the tendency for it to become disease mongering. At what point do we need to control all aspects of body and being such as health and the development of disease? At which point do regular mammograms and prostate exams and colonoscopies become excessive? And even worse, when does diagnosis like depression, ADD and Oppositional Defiance Order (which according to the psychiatry’s diagnostic bible, the DSM IV, is defined as “disobedient, hostile, and defiant behavior toward authority figures”) become oppressive?