I'm tired of being told I should worry about my health
We have medicines for non-existent ills


Felt a little short of breath the other day, walking up a hill. Uh-oh. A nugget of worry lodged for a moment in my mind. At 50-something, I'm in decent enough shape. I don't smoke. I walk several miles most days, and I can still beat my 40-something friend at tennis. Not exactly a candidate for a heart attack. But still. I've read all those stories about women like me, the ones with no risk factors for cardiac disease who were suddenly hit with an attack.

Maybe you've had the same worries - wondered whether some sharp little twinge was heartburn or a heart attack, whether that nasty headache was caused by tension or a stroke. Almost everyone I know who has hit middle age spends a certain amount of time fretting about this or that ailment. My husband and friends and I used to talk about politics, science, religion, kids. Now no dinner party is complete without at least a few minutes' discussion of cholesterol levels, the merits of walking vs. running, or whether or not snoring is a sign of sleep apnea.

It's not as though we're actually sick. Oh sure, a couple of us have high blood pressure, and a dear friend has a serious chronic disease. We all know at least one person our age who has died of cancer or a heart attack. As a medical reporter, I've met many people who suffer terribly from life-threatening or debilitating conditions, and I know that eventually nearly all of us will be hit with a serious illness.

But most of my friends and I, like most middle-aged Americans, are a remarkably healthy lot. If I asked my friends how long they plan to live, I'd bet they'd answer like the respondents to a recent UPI poll, which found that a majority of Americans believe they'll live well into their 80s and beyond - even though the average U.S. life expectancy is 77. It's not that we fear we're in imminent danger of death, but that we think we have to be hyper-vigilant about disease to put it off as long as possible.

That's what worries me. By constantly reminding us to be on the lookout for illness, doctors and the media have made many Americans feel more anxious. I'm not so sure their warnings have made us any healthier, but they have decidedly eroded our sense of well-being. We worry about every ache and pain; we fret that the least little sign of sadness in a teenager is a symptom of clinical depression. But in viewing so many aspects of ordinary human experience as treatable diseases, we may have granted medicine more power than it deserves - or is good for us.

I realize that's a contrarian view of medical progress. But think about all the messages we constantly get from the medical world and the media: Watch your weight. Know your cholesterol. Learn the warning signs of stroke. Get more sleep, or you'll have car accidents. That mole on your back? Could be melanoma. Feeling constipated? Might be ovarian cancer. Take the test. Know your numbers. See your doctor.

Scare tactics

In case you've missed the point, there are headlines like this one that appeared in Forbes magazine: "Medical Symptoms You Shouldn't Ignore." And a new book: Body signs: From Warning Signs to False Alarms ... How to Be Your Own Diagnostic Detective - a compendium of symptoms ranging from dry skin to excessive hiccupping that could signal serious conditions. The book's mission is to "alert you, warn you, maybe even scare you into going to the doctor."

Scaring people, of course, being the operative idea here. Patient advocacy groups such as the American Cancer Society have long believed that the way to improve the nation's health is to increase "awareness" of this or that disease, and the best way to increase awareness is to frighten people into their doctors' offices. As early as 1936, the American Cancer Society was using slogans like "No one is safe from cancer" in an effort to get women to go in for a breast exam.

Today, patient-advocacy groups routinely sound the alarm about whatever condition they're trying to eradicate, either by inflating the number of people affected or by exaggerating the danger. The National Sleep Foundation, for example, a group dedicated to encouraging Americans to get more rest, recently released a poll claiming that a whopping 75 percent of us are so sleep-deprived that it's interfering with our sex lives. That's one heck of a lot of sleepy, undersexed people, and it's pretty hard to believe, given that the National Institutes of Health find that at most 21 percent of the population has recurrent insomnia.

Marketing fear

Striking fear also serves pharmaceutical companies, which want you to worry about diseases, because people who worry are more likely to go to their doctors and ask for drugs than people who don't. It turns out that much of what we - and our doctors - think we know about many health problems has been shaped by drugmakers and their marketers.

If they have a drug but no condition, they will simply invent a disease. I've been reporting this for years. One of the best examples is "osteopenia," a diagnosis that millions of women my age are given every year. Osteopenia is supposedly the precursor to osteoporosis, the gradual loss of bone that happens to most of us as we age. Advanced osteoporosis can make women vulnerable to hip fracture, a serious event when you're old and frail because it often heralds a series of complications, such as pneumonia, that can ultimately lead to death. Millions of women are treated for osteoporosis with drugs that can slow bone loss, thus reducing the risk of hip fracture. Or so the logic goes.

Create a disease

The problem is, osteoporosis and osteopenia aren't really diseases. Before the 1990s, doctors decided that you had osteoporosis if you were elderly and you broke a bone.