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

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

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

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

Overdiagnosis is beginning to be recognized as a public health problem, and is sometimes referred to as an “epidemic.”

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.

Being old enough to die is an achievement, not a defeat, and the freedom it brings is worth celebrating.

To the tech industry, the great advantage of mindfulness is that it seemed to be based firmly on science; no “hippie bullshit” or other “woo-woo” was involved. Positive thinking had never gained much traction in Silicon Valley, possibly because the tech titans needed no help in believing that they could do (or hack or disrupt) anything they set out

Even General Mills, which dates back to the nineteenth century, has added meditation rooms to its buildings, finding that a seven-week course produces striking results: [Eighty-three] per cent of participants said they were “taking time each day to optimise my personal productivity”—up from 23 per cent before the course. Eighty-two per cent said th