Americans have a history of obsession with fads designed to help us live forever. But to what end? Death, notes Barbara Ehrenreich in her new book, "Natural Causes," still awaits us all. In this lively cultural history of our attempts to control our fate, she details the extreme lengths we will go to keep from dying.
Take the idea of preventive medicine, based upon the seemingly helpful notion that the regular physical or mammogram can detect an illness before it takes over and kills us. Yet when Ehrenreich was diagnosed with osteopenia, or thinning of the bones, for which an expensive pharmaceutical product was indicated, rather than being a compliant patient she decided to dig a little deeper. Osteopenia, it turns out, is common in anyone over age 35, and the medicine prescribed for her "condition" was later shown to advance bone degeneration. "A cynic might conclude," she writes, "that preventive medicine exists to transform people into raw material for a profit-hungry medical-industrial complex."
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