Denial by Ajit Varki

Author:Ajit Varki [Varki, Ajit ]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781455511921
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2013-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

At some other “drop zones” (as these skydiving sites are called), each frame of the warning video includes an image of the Grim Reaper, to make the risk very, very clear. But when asked about the rate of dropouts resulting from such warnings, a manager at one of the sites replied, “It’s rare…I can think of maybe two in the last few years. So a very low percentage—less than one thousandth of 1 percent.”

Less extreme but equally puzzling is the risk-taking behavior we all indulge in every day (some of which we have mentioned earlier). This evidence for our facile reality denial is all around us. Let’s begin at the personal level. Those living in educated societies are well aware of what needs to be done to take care of our health: avoid smoking, limit alcohol consumption, maintain an optimal body weight, exercise frequently, avoid unnecessary stress, eat more vegetables and fruits, avoid excess red meat, and so on.13 But we don’t bother with most of these obviously beneficial behaviors. We also forget (or even refuse) to wear seat belts and motorcycle helmets, or we indulge in drunk driving and texting while driving, activities that we know can lead to fatal accidents. And anyone who knows of the high traffic fatality rates on crowded roads in India and China is denying reality when he guns a flimsy motor scooter or rides a bicycle in between all those zigzagging cars.

We all know the old adage “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” But in the past we knew relatively little about optimal ways to prevent disease—the advice we got was mostly in the form of “old wives’ tales” passed along by our grandmothers. Well, it turns out that a lot of what Grandma advised was actually right on the mark. We now have ample scientific evidence that there are many ways in which we can markedly reduce the burden of diseases. Although the recommended prevention might depend on the part of the world one is talking about, let’s just look at so-called Westernized diseases. The big killers of the day in developed countries are cancers and cardiovascular disease (heart attacks and strokes). It turns out that the ways to prevent these diseases are quite well known,14 and we have just mentioned some of them above. With regard to some risky behaviors, such as smoking, there is at least the personal excuse that addiction makes it difficult to break the habit. Not so in these other instances, in which appropriate behavior is all that is called for. Yet the vast majority of us fail to follow these simple preventive measures. We know what to do as individuals and as a society, but we do little to follow through. Instead we face the increasing burden of diseases of a preventable nature and the skyrocketing costs of paying for the consequences, individually and as a society. Perhaps you are less aware that breast-feeding has a very positive effect on the health and eventual IQ of an infant and that it reduces the incidence of breast cancer in mothers.

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