71. The main impression growing out of twelve years on the
faculty of a medical school is that the No. 1 health problem in the U. S. today,
even more than AIDS or cancer, is that Americans don’t know how to think about
health and illness. Our reactions are formed on the terror level
72. We fear the worst, expect the worst, thus invite the worst and the
result is that we are becoming a nation of weaklings and hypochondriacs, a
self-medicating society incapable of distinguishing between casual, everyday
symptoms and those that require professional attention.
Somewhere in our early education we become addicted to the notion that
pain means sickness. We fail to learn that pain is the body’s way of informing
the mind that we are doing something wrong, not necessarily that something is
wrong. We don’t understand that pain may be telling us that we are eating too
much or the wrong things; or that we are smoking too much or drinking too much
or that there is too much emotional congestion in our lives that we are being
worn down by having to cope daily with overcrowded streets and highways, the
pounding noise of garbage grinders, or the cosmic distance between the entrance
to the airport and the departure gate. We get the message of pain all wrong.
Instead of addressing ourselves to the cause, we become pushovers for pills,
driving the pain underground and inviting it to return with increased
authority. 73. Early in life, too, we become seized with the
bizarre idea that we are constantly assaulted by invisible monsters called
germs, and that we have to be on constant alert to protect ourselves against
their fury, but equal emphasis is not given to the presiding fact that our
bodies are superbly equipped to deal with the little demons and the best way of
forestalling an attack is to maintain a sensible lifestyle.