.....Of the myriad health concerns I’ve written about over the years for Peoples Drug Mart, one of the few I’ve managed to escape having myself is hypertension or high blood pressure (HBP).
.....But since I happen to be a hard-wired paranoid (one of the many psychological conditions that I clearly haven’t managed to avoid, but hey, being paranoid has at least allowed me to know that no matter what we in the West think an election has been about, eastern elites will always mange to steal that election and secure most of the power anyway for the provinces in the middle, although that may not be real paranoia so much as sober realism), so I am totally convinced that “they” are trying as hard as “they” can to ensure that I do eventually add HBP to the lengthy list of conditions I already suffer from.
.....“But who are ‘they’’ you ask, “and why do they worry you so much, Arthur?”
.....Well, quite simply, “they” are the thousands and thousands of health experts and medical mavens who, I have become totally convinced, have it as their mission to ensure that before we die, every one of us gets diagnosed with at least one and preferably several chronic medical conditions; in other words, “they” are that army of disease dispensers and condition conveyers |
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chronic medical conditions; in other words, “they” are that army of disease dispensers and condition conveyers who never see a trait or characteristic that
don’t manage to turn into a “symptom” and who won’t be happy until every one of us is a long-term patient.
.....And before you write all this off to my admitted paranoia, let me offer you some evidence that most of you will easily see is excellent proof of my contention, namely, let me tell you some of the tactics disease dispensers use to make us all believe that we’re sicker than we feel.
.....One terrific tactic, for example, is to |
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take a collection of normal issues we all “suffer” from time to time and labelling that collection as a newly-discovered “syndrome”, something like, “Hey, there, Ms. Middle-aged mother of three: do you occasionally get tired and cranky and feel like telling your husband to do his own shirts? Then you are clearly suffering from the “I’ve-had-it syndrome”, and the great news is that medical science just happens to have a cure for you, ma’am.”
.....Another excellent and much-used tactic is to take an old problem and change its name to something that sounds much worse and then to promote that newly-named condition – to doctors and public - as something that needs both careful monitoring and treatment.
.....Thus, you may have noticed that no one suffers from chronic heartburn any more, but rather everyone now has either gastro-esophageal reflux disease (GERD) or non-acid dyspepsia.
Similarly, excessive shyness has morphed into social anxiety syndrome, and on and on (the one I like the most, by the way, is that aging men who pee too much and |
