Debating minutiae and health

November 2 2 Comments latest by Reid

From the New York Times:

“I was crossing Third Avenue yesterday and I was coughing so hard I had to stop and barely made it across,” a patient told me last week. “I’m really scared I’m getting the avian flu.”

I just looked at him. What could I say? He has smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for the last 50 years. He has coughed and wheezed and gasped his way across Third Avenue now for the last 10 years. His emphysema is not going to get any better, but it might stop getting worse if he were to stop smoking.

He made it clear long ago that this is not going to happen. When it comes to the whole cigarette/health question, his motto, apparently, is “What, me worry?”

But the avian flu — now there’s a health scare a person can sink his teeth into. So scary and yet, somehow, so pleasantly distant. So thrilling, so chilling, and yet, at the same time, so not here, not now, not yet. All in all, a completely satisfying health care fear experience. Unlike his actual illness.

In another example, she notes the following:

We looked at each other. It was an impasse. The fact that logic was on my side mattered not at all: evidently the real was just a little too real for her. How much better to find another illness to be scared of, obsess over, get treated for, get rid of.

Read the entire NYTimes essay, or my original article on debating minutiae.

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Posted November 2, 2005 under Personal entrepreneurship

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