~ ~ ~ Another in the Mad Jubilado series ~ ~ ~
I keep finding myself in conversations of health and illness, as I grow older. The Mad Jubilado experiences by the very course of nature and time more health related situations and conversations than in previous stages of life. In such conversations I have noticed a certain irrationality in searches for “the solution,” where no simple (and also effective) answer can usually be found.
Along with simplicity, too many “patients” rely blindly on the “authority” of various assertions by their doctors. It is so much more comforting to find a simple solution provided by an authority figure, requiring little thought and a one-step implementation, than to pursue diverse sources of information from scientific research.
The denial of complexity is similar to denying that there is a problem. Some folks about as old as this Mad Jubilado would like to live in an age like the ideal pastoral existence they think they remember from childhood. Some things always were more complicated than we remember; many others have become even more so.
Some folks, on the other hand, revert to the no-solution solution. I remember too many conversations about which I do not remember anything else but that they contained a certain attitude of fatalism in the guise of scientific skepticism. This seems to happen less often now since most folks seem to have at least some grasp of how certain things damage people and other living things. Such conversations go something like this:
Mr. A – “Did you hear about the medical studies that show that people who eat X have a 42% greater chance of contracting colon cancer than those who don’t?”
Mr. B – “Oh, well, it seems that every day they claim that something else we eat is going to give us cancer. What are we supposed to do, stop eating? Have they really proved it? I know lots of people, for example, who smoke and don’t have cancer. It’s ridiculous; I’m not going to worry about it. We can’t control everything.”
Defeatism, Denial, and Delusion in the face of complexity: None of these is particularly useful. We do live under historically unique conditions. So many materials and chemical compounds now impinge on our lives every day that were never present in the natural environment before industrial civilization.
We have a sense that so many things just could not all be bad for us. At the same time, those who profit from our ignorance try to convince us that the pollutant their industry emits and we are concerned about is really harmless. Don’t forget, the fossil-fuel companies hired the same public relations company to promote climate-change denial that worked for the tobacco companies to convince folks that cigarettes were safe.
We live in a single-cause-of-evil culture. We want to identify the bad guy and have the Lone Ranger come and take him out. Otherwise, things should just be rosy. Just look at foreign policy; well never mind, that’s another very long story… Fact is, life can be and often is, complicated.
And so it is with our health and its relationship with the medical industry as well as the many industries that pollute our air, water, and land. One small part of the denial of the overwhelming evidence of growing climate chaos is the denial of complexity, even to the extent of imagining vast (necessarily complex) conspiracies by climate scientists all over the world to construct stories of complexity in what deniers insist is a simple world.
Recently, by not believing the standard, simple, one-culprit story of arterial plaque that dominates the thinking and practice of cardiology, I was able to dodge what I call a “standard of care” bullet. What might have induced panic about a “life threatening” condition, was resolved by turning to more data on a variety of factors and a scientific analysis of the complexities of biochemistry.
My plaque score was off the charts. Yet I passed the stress test with flying colors, demonstrating by the performance and by imaging that I had no arterial blockages. Yet the cardiologist insisted that I was in grave danger and urging that I take high doses of a new statin drug. I investigated the facts of plaque beyond the ideology of the high-end cardiologist. I consulted with a lipidologist and learned about the complexities of blood lipids and plaque, apparently beyond what the most cardiologists know.
I discovered that a high score on a narrow measure of arterial plaque was not the final word on the matter. Old plaque is essentially scar tissue, yet retains the calcium that was in the original plaque. So it results in a high score. Scar tissue does not flake off like new plaque in the artery.
Facing complexity and seeking to understand it led to a better more complete understanding of risk management and a better approach to maintaining heart health. The heart of the matter reached beyond the standard of care typical of the practice of cardiology. The same prinicple applies to many areas of risk in our complex world.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 