Infectious
negative health beliefs
Beliefs the media reinforces:
Nothing is safe (except conventional medicine). Your health is at risk from every quarter.
Even if things seem less dangerous than they were five years ago, you shouldn't relax, because it's still really dangerous out there.
Fun stuff can kill you. Heck, almost anything could kill you.
Protection from ill health can be found in something outside you -- vitamins, in this case. But -- watch out -- today's protectors may be found to be tomorrow's cancer causers.
Being worried about your health is sensible, useful, and health promoting.
Grilled meats, viruses join carcinogen list
In the Scaring Us for Our Own Good category: It seems the federal government keeps a list (and checks it more than twice) that tracks what naughty items in our environment are suspected of causing cancer. This is a very long list. It seems that just about anything could end up on it.
The article details exactly what kinds of cancers the black-listed items are suspected of contributing to, and gives you the direst possible outlook on the negative effects of the suspect substances, even if they normally appear in such low concentrations you'd have to be a laboratory rat to encounter them in cancer causing amounts.
This week's additions include chemicals found in shampoos, detergents, and perfumes; the delicious crisp crust on grilled and well-done meats; radiation from flying in airplanes; viruses you can pick up having unprotected sex; a chemical in mothballs and toilet bowl deodorizers; and some chemical in dyes. It wouldn't take much imagination to fit exposure to all of them into one fun-filled evening.
Do the cancer police catalog something you routinely have contact with? There's probably a web site where you can scrutinize the whole list, if you feel like working yourself into a frenzy of cancer anxiety. But even if I knew where it was, I wouldn't put the link here because this kind of thinking is HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH.
In case you don't feel adequately warned about the hazards of everyday life, here's another piece of health news:
Children's worst falls are while they play
As opposed to while they sit at the dinner table or lounge in front of the television, evidently.
The gist of this not-particularly-helpful report is: you can let the kids tear around on their bikes wearing only protective headgear, and feel free to drive them all over hell and gone strapped in the car within range of that pesky airbag, but you ought to make them wear helmets on the playground. Or forget the helmets and keep them inside, because with the kind of falls they can take on the playground, even a helmet won't help.
Buried in the article reporting statistics from 1997 on playground accidents that sent kids to the emergency room is the fact that playground injuries are down considerably from 1992 (to 98,000 from 137,000, if you must know), but you are not to let that lull you into a false sense of security! The article goes on to detail what kinds of injuries occur, so you don't think we're talking about skinned knees, and also to enable you to fully engage your imagination in projecting hideous scenarios into your child's future. The report ominously tells us, "Oftentimes playground falls are on the back of the head...With those falls, the brain receives much more energy of impact and..."
And terrible things can happen! Only 40 percent of these accidents occur on school playgrounds, so the message is that danger is everywhere there is play equipment.
Feeling confident about how to guarantee your child's safety now? Are you planning to keep them inside, away from dangerous playgrounds? Well, don't forget that keeping the kids confined to the relative safety of the living room watching TV may, according to another report, turn them into obese, diabetic sociopaths. It's hard to know exactly what it was that allowed so many of us to make it through childhood relatively unscathed. Maybe it was because our parents didn't have so many worrisome studies to read.
Another day, another magic bullet
Do Selenium and Vitamin E prevent prostate cancer? The mind-body connection says "only if you really believe they do." But the literal-minded scientists at the National Cancer Institute (now there's a health-oriented name!) are going to test these items for their magic bullet potential for cancer prevention.
Even though studies clearly indicate that mind-body factors, like independent and optimistic attitude, intimacy, and social support, contribute far, far more to overall health and cancer survival than anything in the magic bullet category, it's too hard to test mind-body factors, therefore, scientists concentrate on testing things that fit their worldview.
And I don't want to hear any yelping about the wonderful work being done by the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) testing alternative and complementary therapies. They do most of their studies from the identical mentality of the conventional medical establishment—because they ARE the conventional medical establishment. The only difference in testing of complementary and alternative therapies is in the details: the potential magic bullets being tested by NCCAM are herbs and unusual supplements. The premise for testing is still based on the belief that something you can ingest or do is the key to preventing or curing cancer.
Fundamental facts about magic bullets
Every treatment leads to cures. Every treatment has failures. Treatments work best when they are new. Their effectiveness tends to fades over time. How does this happen? Does the treatment really stop working as years go by? How is it that formerly effective treatments are later found to be ineffective?
The fact is that the effectiveness was never in the treatment itself, but in the BELIEF in the treatment. The only thing all treatments have in common is belief—the doctors’ and the patients’—in their power to cure. The most powerful medicine is your belief in your ability to be healthy, aided by your health-promoting belief in your chosen treatment, the skill of your doctor, and the resilience of your body.
But does this mean you shouldn't bother with pills or surgery or whatever is being promoted as the latest, greatest cure? No, what it means is that you should use whatever treatment choice fills you with confidence. It means that when you make a choice of healing treatment, you should cultivate the sense of confidence it gives you, and assume your choice will lead to the restoration of your health, instead of worrying that there's a better choice of treatment that's more powerful or magical. It means that anything that helps you relax into health is a good choice, but that the magic is not in the bullet, but in you.