news or in the morning tabloid. And because advertising and hyping really does get your attention and raise your alarm antennae, a lot of you have ended up with skewed perceptions and priorities about what you should really be worried about.
..... For example, survey after survey reveals that most women, even very well-educated ones, are more worried about dying of breast cancer than they are about dying from a heart attack or a stroke, even though about 8 times as many women living today will die of cardiovascular disease – which is largely preventable! - as will die of breast cancer which is not nearly as preventable.
..... But before I get into too much trouble, please note that I’m not advising the media to downplay breast cancer stories and I’m not urging breast cancer proponents to stop pushing so hard to raise more awareness of breast cancer. Actually, I heartily wish that way more at-risk women could be induced, encouraged, educated, or whatever, to get those life-saving mammograms that so many are still |
.
....If you’re not a health news junkie like me, you probably haven’t noticed that the experts have clearly decided that the only way for their favourite disease or condition to get adequate attention from the media and the public is to make dire pronouncements and predictions about their pet condition (and yes, to doctors, diseases are like sports teams in that all physicians have a favourite condition), and to emphasize that their chosen disease has become, like Keannu Reeves in the Matrix, The One, that is, the single greatest health threat to our well being.
.....And the thing is that this “dueling-bandaids” approach works beautifully because the media love nothing better than stories that can include words such as “gloom”, “disaster”, “catastrophe”, and especially “crisis”.
.....For example, just think about how many news stories you’ve seen over the past year predicting near-term “disasters”, “crises”, or “catastrophes” because of bird flu or bacterial infections such as those caused by methicillin resistant staph aureus (MRSA). Yet, as I write this, |
avian flu has so far killed only about 200 people in total worldwide, and although it’s certainly a major problem especially in hospital settings and an emerging one in the community, too, I’m willing to bet
 that most of you don’t know anyone who’s contacted MRSA yet.
..... I don’t, of course, mean to imply that bird flu or MRSA infections are not very real problems to be greatly respected, even feared. I just want to add a bit of perspective on what we know for certain is likely to make most of us ill or lead to our premature demise, because for health educators like myself, the frustrating thing about the undue media attention paid to only certain favoured, headline-grabbing diseases is that it necessarily must come at the expense of other conditions since there’s only so much room for health items on the 6 o’clock
|
WHERE PEOPLE COME
FIRST
