4장
Science or Theater?
Medicine derives its authority from the presumption of scientific basis. While religion requires trust based on social conformity, science offers verifiable claims through observation and testing. Modern people defer to "scientifically proven" remedies and submit to medical procedures because they're supposedly backed by peer-reviewed studies.
But how scientific is "scientific" medicine? By the late 20th century, mathematician David Eddy discovered that medical decision-making lacked formal rationale and solid evidence, finding that treatments were "standing on Jell-O" rather than bedrock evidence. This revelation sparked "evidence-based medicine," challenging whether medicine had previously been merely "eminence-based" - backed by reputation rather than statistics.
Most routine screenings fail the evidence test: mammograms haven't significantly reduced breast cancer mortality, PSA testing hasn't decreased prostate cancer deaths, and colonoscopies prove no more effective than cheaper, non-invasive alternatives. Cancer screening itself rests on flawed assumptions about tumor growth and malignancy, leading to widespread overdiagnosis and harmful overtreatment.
Annual physical examinations, costing about $10 billion yearly, typically include vital signs, blood work, and various examinations determined largely by individual physicians and insurance companies. Despite their invasiveness, these exams don't save lives or reduce illness risk. By 2014, the American College of Physicians declared standard gynecological exams worthless for asymptomatic women, and annual physicals had been deemed "basically worthless" for forty years.
Medicine's relationship with science has always been tenuous. Pre-med students must master organic chemistry as a "weed-out course" despite its minimal relevance to clinical practice. Even cadaver dissection, though questionable pedagogically, persists as a "rite of passage" teaching physicians to violate social norms. This detachment may mask darker emotions - as anthropologist-turned-medical-student Melvin Konner observed, "the patient becomes the enemy" and effective medical practice "may actually require a measure of dislike."
5장
The Fitness Alternative
If I seem cavalier about preventive medical care, it's partly because our consumer culture offers so many alternative pathways to health. In the early 1980s, I began working out at a women's-only gym to address my lower backaches and reclaim "the lost muscular license of youth." After days spent manipulating words, forty-five minutes of zoned-out obedience to fitness instructors felt almost like freedom.
Initially mortified by my body's feebleness, my high pain tolerance transformed into secret competitiveness. I graduated from women's-only classes to a large gym with weight rooms dominated by men. Though I considered this pursuit too trivial to mention to anyone, a male friend eventually noted my "scary" upper arms - my first affirmation.
Health insurance transformed fitness into a moral imperative. Since insurance involves risk sharing, those who are sick or overweight become a "drag" on their company or nation. As physician John H. Knowles stated in 1977, "The cost of sloth, gluttony, alcoholic intemperance, reckless driving, sexual frenzy, and smoking is now a national, and not an individual, responsibility." This perspective ignores how poverty, race, and occupation influence health status, instead fostering resentment toward the "less-than-fit" who "choose" unhealthy behaviors.
The fitness culture has grown increasingly combative. Gyms no longer promote merely "having a good workout" but "crushing" it. Programs like CrossFit boast preparing trainees "not only for the unknown, but for the unknowable," including zombie apocalypses. Oscar Pistorius's tattoo captures this ethos: "I beat my body and make it my slave / I bring it under my complete subjection." The mind's struggle for mastery over the body has become a kind of mortal combat.
6장
Silicon Valley's Mindfulness Paradox
In the perpetual struggle between mind and body enacted by fitness-seekers, the mind is almost universally conceived as the "good guy" - the moral authority that must prevail. But can the mind be trusted? Recently, a new concern has emerged: the mind's fundamental cognitive powers appear to be diminishing. A 2015 study found the average adult attention span had shrunk from twelve seconds to eight seconds in just twelve years - shorter than a goldfish's attention span.
The perpetrator of our diminishing attention spans was easy to identify: Silicon Valley and the high-tech industry that created the tempting devices consuming so much of our time. Ironically, Silicon Valley itself seemed to be ground zero of the inattentiveness epidemic, with skyrocketing diagnoses of autism and Asperger's syndrome in Santa Clara County.
Rather than responding with humility to evidence that their products were "rewiring" human brains and depleting attention spans, Silicon Valley maintained its characteristic arrogance. As tech critic Evgeny Morozov noted, the industry embraces "solutionism" - recognizing problems only if they can be solved with clean technological solutions. This mindset breeds megalomania: space travel, healthcare, even death itself became challenges to "hack."
Mindfulness emerged as a brilliant pivot, transforming tech companies from villains in the inattentiveness epidemic to putative saviors. Former Buddhist monk Andy Puddicombe created Headspace, eventually developing meditation apps that transformed him from near-destitution to $25 million net worth. This is Buddhism sliced up, commodified, and drained of all reference to the transcendent - "the instruction manual that should come with our iPhones."
Mass-market mindfulness spread from Silicon Valley like a new app - in fact, over five hundred mindfulness apps emerged with names like "Simply Being" and "Buddhify." Unlike previous self-improvement trends transmitted via books and CDs, mindfulness could be carried on smartphones, featuring timed meditation sessions with soothing voices, soporific music, and cloying nature imagery.
7장
Death Defies Our Control
Despite all efforts at health optimization, death comes for everyone - even health advocates. Lucille Roberts, women's gym chain owner who "wouldn't touch a French fry," died of lung cancer at 59. Jerry Rubin, who tried every health fad available, died at 56 after jaywalking into traffic. Running guru Jim Fixx died at 52 while jogging, and Henry S. Lodge, author of "Younger Next Year," died at 58 from pancreatic cancer.
Most disturbing was John H. Knowles' death at 52 from pancreatic cancer. As director of the Rockefeller Foundation, he had promoted the "doctrine of personal responsibility" for health, arguing most illnesses result from "gluttony, alcoholic intemperance, reckless driving, sexual frenzy, and smoking." Yet we persist in subjecting those who die young to bio-moral autopsies: Did they smoke? Drink? Eat poorly?
Around the first decade of the 21st century, demographers noticed an unexpected uptick in death rates among poor white Americans - contradicting the narrative that better nutrition and healthcare would guarantee longer lives for all. The gap between black and white life expectancies began narrowing, not because blacks were living longer, but because poor whites were dying faster.
Some economists initially blamed poor health habits and inability to delay gratification. But deeper analysis revealed smoking accounted for only one-fifth to one-third of excess deaths. The rest came from alcoholism, opioid addiction, and suicide. The mortality gap between rich and poor whites widened dramatically - for men born in 1920, the life expectancy difference between top and bottom 10% of earners was six years; for those born in 1950, it more than doubled to fourteen years.
The explanation lies partly in economic devastation. Jobs that once allowed a man with a strong back to support a family disappeared, leaving only work once relegated to women and minorities. The closest historical parallel might be the Soviet Union's collapse, where Russian male life expectancy plummeted from 62 to 58 years in the 1990s as jobs vanished and social welfare systems collapsed.
8장
The Myth of Bodily Harmony
The growing economic inequality has created two different health paradigms in America. For the poor, "health" manifests as punitive corporate wellness programs that subject employees to surveillance and penalties for failing to meet arbitrary health metrics. For the wealthy, "wellness" has become a luxury status symbol displayed through yoga totes and green juices, and pursued at exclusive resorts offering everything from Rolfing to "sound therapy" with Tibetan drums.
These luxury wellness experiences promise to "reconnect you to your mind, body, and spirit" through exotic rituals performed alongside indigenous shamans in breathtaking global settings. Despite drawing from disparate traditions, wellness marketing consistently emphasizes "harmony," "wholeness," and "balance." The underlying philosophy is holism - the idea that everything within an individual must be aligned for maximum effectiveness and power.
By the late twentieth century, medical science needed a paradigm shift to account for the whole person beyond cadaver studies. The assumption that all body parts work in harmony has been biology's dominant paradigm. Since William Harvey discovered the heart's function in blood circulation, biologists have assigned functions to every body part, viewing the body as a perfectly designed machine with cooperating components.
This mechanical view portrays the body as a flawless system where parts selflessly perform assigned roles. However, this optimistic bias ignores contradictory evidence like vestigial features and structural elements that don't serve clear functions. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin challenged this "adaptationist" view, noting that not everything in biology can be explained through function.
The harmonious body model also fails to explain diseases like cancer and autoimmune disorders, where cells attack the very system they supposedly serve. The scientific understanding of menstruation reveals this fundamental conflict within biology's paradigms. While the "positive" view portrays menstruation as a natural process where the uterus sheds unnecessary lining, in reality, menstruation resembles an inflammatory response, not the gentle "shedding" process often described.
9장
Cellular Decision-Making
Long before molecular biology's rise, immunology began with the close observation of individual macrophages by Elie Metchnikoff, a brilliant Russian zoologist who discovered phagocytosis-the process by which macrophages engulf and digest particles. He controversially suggested these cells, enjoying "the most independence" of any body cells, could decide on their own what to attack and what to leave alone.
His contemporaries rejected this explanation as too "vitalistic," questioning how a microscopic cell could make decisions without a nervous system. Yet a century later, the once-forbidden phrase "cellular decision making" has gained scientific respectability, appearing in article titles by 2005 and becoming the subject of international conferences by 2010.
New techniques like intravital microscopy reveal striking individuality among cells. Most cells follow unique paths far from the statistical average. Natural killer cells show variable behavior, with only half participating in attacks while a minority become "serial killers." T cells move by "repetitive lunges" with high probability of changing direction after each pause, displaying unpredictable behavior.
The differences between a human navigating a sidewalk and a cell are vast in scale, but moment by moment, both are processing incoming data and making decisions. Even ibises demonstrate this principle - their morning liftoffs aren't controlled by some central command but emerge from jostling and nudging, exemplifying what scientists call "the Harvard law of animal behavior": animals "will do what it damn well pleases."
Agency extends further down the scale than we imagine. German researchers discovered "free will" in fruit flies, whose unpredictable motion patterns confer survival advantages against predators. Even viruses like phage lambda make crucial "decisions" when infecting bacteria. At the quantum level, subatomic particles display inherent unpredictability - electrons "choose" which slit to pass through, exhibiting what physicist Freeman Dyson calls a "certain kind of freedom."
10장
The Illusion of Successful Aging
The pressure to maintain physical fitness only intensifies with age. Rather than the reclining chair you might have imagined awaiting retirement, your future likely holds a treadmill. One bossy self-help book commands seniors to "Exercise six days a week for the rest of your life" without negotiations or excuses, insisting that after fifty, exercise is no longer optional but mandatory to avoid "getting old."
This concept of "successful aging" - essentially indistinguishable from not aging at all - emerged in the 1980s and now appears under various names like "active aging," "healthy aging," and "anti-aging" throughout the Western world. A common theme is that aging itself is abnormal and unacceptable - as one physician declares, age-related ailments are "not a normal part of growing old. They are an outrage."
The responsibility for successful aging falls squarely on the individual, with little consideration for material factors like wealth or social support. Yet the gurus' instructions are contradictory and demanding. Dietary advice ranges from Paleo to complex carbohydrates to Mediterranean, with the only consistent rule being deprivation - anything enjoyable should probably be avoided.
Medical science now views aging as a disease rather than a normal life stage. Rather than simple cellular decay, aging involves the immune system actively responding to damaged cells, creating inflammation throughout the body. This "chronic smoldering oxidative and inflammatory stress" explains why aging disorders like atherosclerosis, arthritis, Alzheimer's, diabetes, and osteoporosis are all inflammatory diseases characterized by macrophage buildup.
From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense - the survival of non-reproductive older individuals offers no advantage and might waste resources better used by the young. Philip Roth captured this biological reality in his novel Everyman when he wrote that "old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre." The immune cells that protect us in youth ultimately destroy us in old age, raising the question: are immune cells friends or foes?
11장
Beyond the Self
Who is truly in charge of our bodies and minds? The physical body cannot be the ultimate controller since it inevitably liquefies or turns to dust. This reality drives humans to posit some immaterial essence that survives the body - a soul, spirit, or self.
As feudal structures weakened in early modern Europe, people could imagine themselves as individuals capable of self-initiated change and upward mobility. Protestantism, especially Calvinism, accelerated this transformation by requiring perpetual introspection to make one's soul acceptable to God. As science and secularism eroded belief in God, the habit of introspection remained, but now focused on private emotional states rather than divine dialogue.
The modern self essentially inherited attributes previously assigned to God. Our culture's language of self-regard now has distinctly religious qualities - we're told to "believe" in ourselves, "esteem" ourselves, and above all, "love" ourselves. In today's capitalist culture, the self has been further objectified into a commodity demanding continual maintenance - a "brand."
This self-reflection creates an inescapable paradox: How can the self be both knower and known, subject and object, lover and beloved? This psychological hall of mirrors may explain why the rise of self-awareness in 17th century Europe coincided with an epidemic of "melancholy" that closely resembles modern depression.
Confronting one's own demise reveals a fear so overwhelming that our minds turn aside, unable to truly envision our nonexistence. We may imagine traces persisting through children or creative works, but the unique constellation of memories and consciousness that is "me" will vanish. The self thus becomes an obstacle to truly successful aging.
Recently, psychedelic drug research has opened a surprising new avenue for understanding the self as an obstacle to peaceful death. Studies using psilocybin with terminal cancer patients show remarkable results. Brain scans reveal the drug suppresses the brain's "default-mode network" responsible for self-awareness. The more thoroughly this function is suppressed, the more the experience resembles a mystical one with "ego dissolution" followed by profound unity with the universe.
What are we, then? Our bodies aren't burdens we drag around nor infinitely malleable clay. They seethe with cellular life, sometimes even warring cells with no interest in the whole organism's survival. Our minds, housing what we imagine as a singular self, are thoroughly colonized by others' thoughts through language and culture. There is no immutable kernel at our core - thinking involves conflict between neural patterns, some synchronizing while others cancel each other out.
Death into a dead world means leaving one's bones to bleach in a desert lit by a dying star. But dying into the actual world, seething with life and endless possibility, feels more like an embrace of ongoing life. As Bertolt Brecht wrote on his deathbed: "Already for some time / I had lost all fear of death. For nothing / Can be wrong with me if I myself / Am nothing... I managed to enjoy / The song of every blackbird after me too." He was dying, but that was all right. The blackbirds would keep on singing.
