02 Jan 2006
Diagnosis before symptoms

Something stuck me yesterday while I was watching football that is certainly relevant here.

Are you a little depressed following the hustle and bustle of the holidays? Used to be considered fairly normal, now you've got SAD. Feel a bit queasy after that pepperoni pizza and six taco's? Used to be called heartburn, but today it's GERD, and you're a candidate for a purple pill. Twenty years ago if you were a guy who worked 80 hours a week in a high stress job and didn't feel like making whoopee with the sweetie it was called "overwork", but today, it's "erectile dysfunction", and you have a choice of pills that'll give you continuous woody from Friday night to Monday morning.

And I won't even get into Prozac, Paxil and the other "happy pills", for when you're just feeling out of sorts with no particular cause or reason.

Is this progress?

Laudator Temporis Acti recently mentioned an ancient Roman festival in honor of the goddess Angeronia:

On the twelfth day before the Kalends of January there is a rest day in honor of the goddess Angeronia, to whom the pontiffs offer sacrifice in the temple of Volupia. According to Verrius Flaccus, this goddess is called Angeronia because, duly propitiated, she banishes anxiety (angores) and mental distress. Masurius adds that an image of this goddess, with the mouth bound up and sealed, is placed on the altar of Volupia, because all who conceal their pain and care find, thanks to their endurance, great joy (voluptas) at last.

Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.10.7-8 (tr. Percival Vaughan Davies)

Boy oh boy, have traditions like this ever gone the way of the dodo! Forget the "stiff upper lip": it seems that unless our lips are flapping we must be hiding something, and consequentially sick, mentally or physically! This seems to be a peculiar failure of Modern Times, especially in the West. We are incapable of ceasing our nearly continual whining - and we have a pill to go with each whine. Anything resembling stoicism is now considered as "repression", and unless we let it all hang out, preferably on national TV, we're just not healthy.

And in this sense, I think the pill pushers are right on: we've never been sicker, and they're the main symptom.

Scientists are working on a method to enable doctors to identify disease even before symptoms appear.

(link) [BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition]

00:00 /Home | 5 comments | permanent link

Answering Back to the News Media, Using the Internet

Interesting article on the blogosphere's "corrections" of the main stream media. This isn't really a fundamental change: people and corporations who've felt themselves wrongs by the media have struck back for years with paid print advertising and small pamphlets. What's different is that the scope of the reply/rebuttal is now global, and the cost to "strike back" has been lowered dramatically as well.

Subjects of newspaper articles and news broadcasts now fight back with the same methods reporters use to generate articles and broadcasts.

(link) [NYT > Home Page]

00:00 /Technology | 1 comment | permanent link