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The politics behind personal responsibility for health
Consumers of cell phones – actually, consumers of any product or service that isn’t essential for health or survival — clearly benefit from the competitive, market-driven economies of today’s modern...
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Healthy lifestyles serve political interests
The practice of western medicine remained virtually unchanged from the time of the ancient Greeks to the mid-19th century. This is a testament to medicine’s basically conservative nature: Let’s not...
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Old age and the limitations of a healthy lifestyle
A nice op-ed in the NY Times touches on our belief that living a healthy lifestyle guarantees a long and able-bodied life. The author, Susan Jacoby, speaks specifically to the issue of dementia and...
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Guest post: A fat lot of good
Today’s post is a guest column by writer and editor Kate Gilderdale. It’s on a subject close to my heart – the promotion of personal responsibility for healthy lifestyles. Unlike me, Kate has a highly...
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From healthism to overdiagnosis
In his new book, Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health, Dr. H. Gilbert Welch enumerates how the cutoff points that determine whether a patient should be treated for a disease –...
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Guest post: A sound mind in a disintegrating body
In an attempt to balance my very serious attitude towards the subject of healthism – the idea that individuals should be held personally responsible for their health; an idea promoted at a time of...
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Guest post: Guilt-edged
Today was in need of humor. Here is another guest post from Kate Gilderdale (the original can be found here), who blogs at The Jaundiced View. I found a website that lists (in a most unfortunate...
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What is healthism? (part one)
Throughout history there’s been an understandable desire to find connections between our behavior and our health. Human beings have practiced health regimens involving diet, exercise and hygiene since...
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What is healthism? (part two)
In part one of this post I explained the most common meaning of healthism (an excessive preoccupation with healthy lifestyles and feeling personally responsible for our health) and described an...
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On healthism, the social determinants of health, conformity, & embracing the...
It’s always hard to be sure about these things, but I think the reason I decided to take a ‘sabbatical’ from blogging last July was that I was interested in too many seemingly unrelated topics. Writing...
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On healthism, the social determinants of health, conformity, & embracing the...
Continued from part one, where I discussed the first three of my six interests: healthism, medicalization, and psychological and physical conformity. Click on the graphic below to see a larger image....
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On healthism, the social determinants of health, conformity, & embracing the...
Continued from parts one and two, where I defined the terms used in the following diagram of my blogging interests. Click on the graphic for a larger image. If I had written the previous two posts a...
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On healthism, the social determinants of health, conformity, & embracing the...
Continued from parts one, two, and three. A year ago, when I decided to call my declining rate of blogging a ‘sabbatical,’ I wrote down some questions to explore while I took time off to read. How did...
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Healthy lifestyles: The antecedents
In the 1970s, public health policies began to promote the idea that individuals are responsible for their health and therefore have an obligation to adopt healthy lifestyles. Over the ensuing decades,...
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Healthy lifestyles: The unfortunate consequences
Continued from the previous post, where I discussed the expansion of universal health care prior to the 1970s, how this created a growing demand for health care, and the problem health care costs posed...
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Healthy lifestyles: Social class. A precarious optimism
Continued from the previous post, where I noted that the Lalonde report — despite its good intentions — was followed by an emphasis on healthy lifestyles and personal responsibility for health, as well...
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Neoliberalism, tobacco, and public health (1)
This post became much too long, so I’ve divided it into two parts. The first part is mainly about neoliberalism; the second mainly about graphic warnings on cigarette packs (plus smoking among the...
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When healthy eating becomes unhealthy
Meghan O’Rourke, poet and author (Halflife: Poems, Once: Poems, The Long Goodbye: A Year of Grieving), has written a wonderful piece for The New Yorker on living with a chronic illness. It’s called...
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Big Data, privacy, and civil disobedience
Back in May, Evgeny Morozov wrote a review for The New York Times Book Review of two books: The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? by Patrick Tucker and Social...
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When health was something we could simply “forget about”
I came across the following sentence in The Positive Thinkers, a book originally published in 1965. It strikes me as a good example of how the meaning of health has changed. (emphasis added) Health is...
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