To D or Not to (Vitamin D)? – Using Medical News Wisely
The year before last you couldn’t go more than one winter week without a headline or news anchor telling you that your winter blues may be due to vitamin D deficiency, at which point vitamin manufacturers and sellers everywhere littered your grocery store aisles with vitamin D bottles. We all took loads of vitamin D. Jump two years forward. A recent study came out suggesting that vitamin D deficiency does not cause depression, but data implies it is the reverse. Depression causes […]
Science Isn’t Magic. (It’s better!) Doctors Aren’t Omnipotent. (They’re human!)
Trust your health care providers, but know that they are neither omniscient nor infallible – they may thank you for your scrutiny The only thing more impressive than how much we know about biology – both in scale and content – is how much we don’t know. Yet, a pervasive thought exists that might have been borne out of the vaguely all-knowing feeling that Google gives us. The world thinks that science knows how the body works – entirely. This gives […]
You Live in Your Body – Not Your Doctor
I don’t know when it happened, exactly. But at some point in the last few decades, we as a nation, collectively turned over our bodies to doctors and said “here, fix this and get back to me when you have it sorted out.” It makes some sense. We need lawyers for legal things. Accountants for the undecipherable tax code, and so on. We outsource complex things to complexity experts. It’s a useful division of labor. But outsourcing your health is […]