(no subject)

[superbadgirl]

Why I Sometimes Think, While Tragic, Dying Young Isn't a Bad Thing

I know, that sounds bad. I grit my teeth every time a pharmaceutical ad comes on the TV, though. I often wonder if what is being advertised is really helping people's conditions or simply masking them. Wouldn't it be better to spend money on encouraging people to lead lifestyles which might help avoid medical conditions? I realize that some things are unavoidable, but...

Besides that, the list of potential side effects are so horrific that I can't imagine voluntarily taking some of the drugs they want folks to take. And these are only the side effects they know about now - if a drug is new on the market, it could be decades before they really know what else it does to people.

That said, it is very sad to think of so many people dependent on drugs and/or other things. I remember after my father's heart attack how surprised we all were when the doctor warned him to lay off the alcohol along with his drastic change in diet. Even my mother didn't realize how much he turned to hard liquor to help ease the pain of arthritis (my dad's got extremely gnarled fingers from a life of manual labor).

Comments

[aizjanika.livejournal.com]

Oh, I didn't mean it like that. I think willpower is a very difficult thing. As someone whose struggled with weight issues for my entire adult life--and having the dieting lead to borderline eating disorders, and so on, I'd never fault anyone for having those kinds of problems.

No, I meant that people really aren't interested in trying new diets (and I don't mean weight loss diets). People are afraid to veer away from the "four food groups" type of diet, even though even the USDA or whoever has said that's not a good way to "balance" one's diet.

I also find it interesting that, in our culture, diets like Atkins become extremely popular to the point that even people not on the diet believing that carbs are bad, when all medical and scientific evidence is to the contrary, and, in fact, medical evidence shows that that type of diet is very, very bad for people for a whole lot of reasons.

People are so willing to believe that eating meat and fat is good for you, but they think vegetarians are strange and weird and likely to be unhealthy, in spite of all scientific evidence to the contrary.

It's all about as mind-boggling as people voting for G.W. even once, much less twice.