1. My Mom has sleep apnea. I do too. My Dad did, too, worse than any­body I’ve ever heard. A lot of peo­ple do, it seems.

   The Uni­ver­sity Health Ser­vices have a fancy clinic now, just down the street from our house, where they will fit you with a fancy CPAP machine that you will wear every night for the rest of your life and it will pos­si­bly make you bet­ter, so your risk of heart dis­ease is lower because you don’t wake up so much in the night.

   The sleep apnea thing is a huge growth indus­try, clearly. It’s a simply-​​described con­di­tion with a broad range of pos­si­bly seri­ous detri­men­tal med­ical effects, and it’s often treat­able. Made for wind­fall prof­its: Soon it will be clear that you’re being self­ish and hog­ging med­ical effort if you don’t get treated. Think of the sav­ings that could be passed on to treat real dis­eases, if only we mouth-​​breathers didn’t clog up the health­care pro­fes­sion with our triv­ial problems.

2. An over-​​produced glossy six-​​color flyer shoved in every grad student’s mail­box (what? maybe 5000 of them?) the other day pointed out that over 30% of grad­u­ate stu­dents seek help for depres­sion or stress-​​related syn­dromes. That makes sense to me; seems a lit­tle scant, frankly.

   When I was a Biol­ogy grad stu­dent at U Penn, there came a point where my cohort sud­denly looked across the lunchtime bitch-​​table at one another, and some­thing in folks’ eyes made me call out, “Any­body not tak­ing anti­de­pres­sants here, now, raise your hand.” And we all sat there rais­ing our eye­brows at each other. Not our hands.

   I’m not depressed but merely stressed these days. I find I don’t get depressed much any more, per­haps because now I am old and like many old peo­ple I have much more ratio­nal first-​​hand expe­ri­ence of how much worse it can be. The inim­i­cal evil of the world, the relent­less march towards the grave, &c &c. Sure there’s some stress, but… stress, well, that’s just an extra dose of cor­ti­sol and some insom­nia. Every­body knows older peo­ple sleep less.

   At any rate, I sus­pect the rate of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cally treated depres­sion among the pop­u­lace is rel­a­tively high. Every week get between three and five emails announc­ing “Take Time Off From Your Ph.D.!” and “Wind­ing Down the Stress Lev­els” and “No, Really, Delayed Grat­i­fi­ca­tion is On Its Way To You Some­day Real Soon Now, We Promise” meet­ings from the grad school HQ.

   I am led to con­clude that smart peo­ple prob­a­bly get depressed more than dumb ones. Which makes a kind of sense, in hind­sight. Right? Think of the sav­ings that would result if we all sought treat­ment, and the accom­pa­ny­ing pro­duc­tiv­ity gains if smar­ties just stopped being depressed and stressed, stopped malin­ger­ing. It would fos­ter a new era of… well, something.

   Med­ical break­throughs, surely. Because smart peo­ple, they helped make med­i­cine the rev­o­lu­tion­ary neces­sity it is today.

3. Obe­sity is ram­pant in Amer­ica (includ­ing Canada and some US Pro­tec­torates, I ‘spect). We’re all gonna get vas­cu­lar dis­ease and dia­betes. You’re a bad per­son if you don’t dili­gently exer­cise, eat rea­son­able amounts of bran and pome­gran­ate and spelt wheat, and end up using valu­able resources that could bet­ter be applied to help peo­ple who need it.

   I am led to believe it’s a worse social sin for smart peo­ple to be over­weight. Which makes a kind of sense. Because poor peo­ple are fat, and smart peo­ple aren’t poor. Right? (I’m still work­ing on this one). But think of the sav­ings if we all just took three hours a day and walked around in bright white shoes and officewear, and ate salad at the cafeteria—savings that would ben­e­fit the really sick.

   That’s the feel­ing I got from my recent Health Main­te­nance Exam, at least. “When are you going to get in shape?” Because, my young man, we’re not going to wait for you much longer.

4. I am told that my gen­er­a­tion (“13ers”, also known as Early-​​onset GenX Syn­drome Suf­fer­ers) and those after­wards are prone to get­ting aller­gies and asthma and autoim­mune dis­eases because we didn’t eat enough dirt when we were kids, and now it’s too late to eat dirt because our immune sys­tems have learned incor­rectly that (a) many impor­tant mol­e­cules in our bod­ies look some­thing like the sur­faces of Bad Microbes, and (b) the sur­faces of many ubiq­ui­tous mol­e­cules on the sur­face of Reg­u­lar House­hold Stuff (dogs, books, flow­ers) also bear a strik­ing sim­i­lar­ity to the sur­faces of Bad Microbes, so © our noses are always run­ning and we com­plain fre­quently of seri­ous headaches, and there­fore (d) we’ll need to take pro­phy­lac­tic anti­his­t­a­mines for the rest of our lives.

   I bet the smart kids are more prone to aller­gies. Think of the stereo­type: asth­matic, myopic dweebs. No dirt-​​eating at all as a kid = sickly and sniffly. Stereo­types, as it hap­pens, don’t actu­ally lie that often. Right? So as a par­ent you’re shirk­ing if you don’t take your kids out­side now and then and force-​​feed them some dirt.

   And then spray them quickly with antibac­te­r­ial soap.

   Think of the sav­ings &c &c.

5. And there’s statins. Wow. Biggest-​​selling phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals in the world. We’re all much bet­ter for tak­ing them. Think of the sav­ings in the med­ical com­mu­nity that can be passed on to treat other, more seri­ous patho­log­i­cal con­di­tions. ‘Nuff said.
6. New-​​generation NSAIDs. Aspirin is dan­ger­ous; it might give you tummy trou­bles. Never take aspirin! We should all switch to newer NSAIDs, that are much bet­ter because they’re newer. Sav­ings. Passed on. Think!

Am I say­ing I think we’re a bunch of whin­ers? No. These are all real prob­lems, espe­cially the just plain con­stant pain one—my Mom suf­fers from ter­ri­ble osteoarthri­tis, for instance, and NSAIDs give her the abil­ity to walk around a bit. Depres­sion sucks, is dan­ger­ous, is more ter­ri­ble in a way than all the oth­ers, because you watch your­self being sick and unable to do any­thing about it. Heart dis­ease, dia­betes, sleep­less­ness, are all actual Bad Things. I’ve watched sev­eral peo­ple die badly from dia­betes and its complications.

Nobody should suf­fer any of these prob­lems or risks. Nobody any­where. We are not—the sick ones—whiners.

Alas, we all do suf­fer these prob­lems. If not these, then some other ones. Don’t get me started on cancer.

An under­re­ported sta­tis­tic I have not read lately, pre­sented here as a reminder: nearly 100% of patients seek­ing med­ical treat­ment even­tu­ally die.

How can we stom­ach that? Why doesn’t any­body do some­thing about it?!

What I’m prod­ding with my Short Stick here is some­thing about our col­lec­tive atti­tudes. Cul­ture. Tacit assump­tions, implicit under­stand­ings. I don’t know whose in par­tic­u­lar. Doc­tors? Sure. They are, in gen­eral, igno­rant over­worked habit­u­al­ists who have so lit­tle time to lis­ten to details or think about con­se­quences that they often as not end up mis­treat­ing their patients. That is, pre­scrib­ing any­thing just to get the patients off their backs.

And the patients, well, they’re stuffed so full of risk aver­sion that they imme­di­ately seek advice and treat­ment and solace for any com­plaint, includ­ing (as noted in (2) above) over-​​complaining and Gen­er­al­ized Life Dif­fi­culty. They want surety, and feel betrayed when some­thing goes wrong that isn’t imme­di­ately replaced or refunded under their implicit War­ranty Ser­vice Agreement.

And then it hits me: This is how reli­gions get started.

Look at it. Think about it.

We have the over­whelm­ing desire for sim­ple, effec­tive solu­tions to ubiq­ui­tous prob­lems. We have a har­ried spe­cial class, who by dint of his­tor­i­cal con­tin­gency and a few early suc­cesses have become the class explic­itly charged with pro­vid­ing solu­tions for those prob­lems. But inevitably they’re unable to cope with the world’s diver­sity, entropy’s insid­i­ous cre­ativ­ity. So these peo­ple, they focus on low-​​hanging fruit, and increas­ingly point out how much more work they could get done if peo­ple just went through a few sim­ple rit­ual moves: statins, CPAP machines, salad not fat, just plain aspirin is now Bad For You. And the obser­vant pop­u­lace, and the major­ity of the spe­cial­ist priest­hood, don’t have the time or incli­na­tion to actu­ally think about what hap­pens in the end. What hap­pens to every solace-​​seeker, no mat­ter what they try. They shunt old and sick peo­ple off to spe­cial tem­ples, for prepara­tory purifi­ca­tion cer­e­monies involv­ing res­pi­ra­tory support.

Those sick folks, they’ve gone to A Bet­ter Place. Some lucky few come back, briefly, and tell thank­ful tales of the wonders.

But they always go back, in the end. Back to the place we don’t see them.

Reli­gion is not a symp­tom of irra­tional­ity. Irra­tional­ity takes hold of all of us, no mat­ter what. We are not ratio­nal beings. Indeed, the mod­ern sci­en­tific atheist’s ten­dency to decry irra­tional reli­gios­ity so flies in the face of facts as to be reduced to an artis­tic act of Grand Irony. Pre­scrip­tivist Phi­los­o­phy as Per­for­mance Art.

Reli­gion is a robust cul­tural sys­tem, a cul­tural attrac­tor that sucks in soci­eties whole­sale. Look at how far it’s pro­gressed, in just the last 100 years or so. In the case of Med­i­cine, I mean.

So many con­verts. So many ads in all the mag­a­zines. “Ask Your Doctor.”

It thrives because any priest­hood inevitably fails when asked to work on the Really Hard Stuff. So it adapts by play­ing to our inher­ent pain-​​avoidance, trot­ting out the old favorite solu­tions of seques­tra­tion and denun­ci­a­tion of prob­lem­atic facts, eli­sion of com­plex­ity, denial of diversity.

Reli­gion thrives because we are built to clas­sify, but made to over-​​generalize.

Of course, it’s more com­pli­cated than that. But we don’t have time to go into that now.