Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

But there’s a darker, more menacing side to the preoccupation with fitness, and this is the widespread suspicion that if you can’t control your own body, you’re not fit, in any sense, to control anyone else, and in their work lives that is a large part of what typical gym-goers do.

Early anthropologists could have called the healing practices of so-called primitive peoples “health care,” but they took pains to distinguish the native activities from the purposeful interventions of Euro-American physicians. The latter were thought to be rational and scientific, while the former were “mere” rituals, and the taint of imperialist

There is nothing about ourselves that is not potentially subject to our control.

Never mind that poverty, race, and occupation play a huge role in determining one’s health status, the doctrine of individual responsibility means that the less-than-fit person is a suitable source not only of revulsion but resentment. The objection raised over and over to any proposed expansion of health insurance was, in so many words: Why should

Like twentieth-century Russian workers or nineteenth-century Polynesians, the American working class—or at least the white part of it—which could once hope for steady work at decent pay, has lost much of its way of life.

I may not be able to do much about grievous injustice in the world, at least not by myself or in very short order, but I can decide to increase the weight on the leg press machine by twenty pounds and achieve that within a few weeks. The gym, which once looked so alien and forbidding to me, became one of the few sites where I could reliably exert c

One reason for the compulsive urge to test and screen and monitor is profit, and this is especially true in the United States, with its heavily private and often for-profit health system. How is a doctor—or hospital or drug company—to make money from essentially healthy patients?

If a medical procedure has no demonstrable effect on a person’s physiology, then how should that procedure be classified? Clearly it is a ritual, which can be defined very generally as a “solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order.”1 But rituals can also have intangible psychological effects, so the

Everything we experience subjectively, every thought and emotion, produces at least transient physiological changes in the brain.