Death

A new book:

No other period of life has such a feared and mysterious ending. Childhood ends with the budding of puberty and the new challenges of adolescence. Adolescence passes away in the excitement of pulsating hormones, shedding its awkward, uncertain skin in the journey into young adulthood. The subsequent stages of adulthood bring undiscovered treasures of love, children, work, and spirit. Even in the face of failure or lost opportunities, there is always hope for something new. But aging seems to bring this process to a halt. The horizon is unknown except for the single fact that a true ending will come ...   Excerpted from How We Age: A Doctor's Journey into the Heart of Growing Old, by Marc E. Agronin, M.D. Available from Da Capo Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2011.                              

 From Salon.com[http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/02/05/how_we_age_excerpt/index.html]

When a student in my class died from an alcohol overdose one semester,  I spent some time looking for an appropriate passage to read to the class.  I couldn't just let him disappear from the class with no acknowledgment, especially since it had been obvious to me that he was in trouble.  I chose to read the following:

50.  Death
Men flow into life, and ebb into death.
Some are filled with life;
Some are empty with death;
Some hold fast to life, and thereby perish,
For life is an abstraction.
Those who are filled with life
Need not fear tigers and rhinos in the wilds,
Nor wear armour and shields in battle;
The rhinoceros finds no place in them for its horn,
The tiger no place for its claw,
The soldier no place for a weapon,
For death finds no place in them.
Tao Te Ching, excerpts
http://www.alamo.edu/nvc/programs/humanities/huma/pages/divine_taoTeChing.htm#50Death

Dirty Princesses?

We should rethink the cleanliness goal:  recent research from Oregon State University reported on NPR suggests that the Western rise in autoimmune diseases such as asthma and allergies, that is associated with overly clean societies and identified as such by the term 'the hygiene hypothesis', and which disproportionately affects women, might be caused by the different standards to which we hold girls versus boys.  Girls are generally discouraged from getting dirty (these photos to the contrary) and wear more restrictive clothing which inhibits the tendency to run, jump, slip or fall.

In a related report, a new book by Peggy Orenstein titled "Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture" documents the tide of messages little girls encounter, pointing them in the direction of 'princesshood.' An excerpt from the NPR interview transcript reads:

What was going on here? My fellow mothers, women who once swore they would never be dependent on a man, smiled indulgently at daughters who warbled "So This Is Love" or insisted on being addressed as Snow White. The supermarket checkout clerk invariably greeted Daisy with "Hi, Princess." The waitress at our local breakfast joint, a hipster with a pierced tongue and a skull tattooed on her neck, called Daisy's "funny-face pancakes" her "princess meal"; the nice lady at Longs Drugs offered us a free balloon, then said, "I bet I know your favorite color!" and handed Daisy a pink one rather than letting her choose for herself. Then, shortly after Daisy's third birthday, our high-priced pediatric dentist — the one whose practice was tricked out with comic books, DVDs, and arcade games — pointed to the exam chair and asked, "Would you like to sit in my special princess throne so I can sparkle your teeth?" [http://www.npr.org/2011/02/05/133471639/saving-our-daughters-from-an-army-of-princesses]

In a quick search this morning to find an image of a little girl covered in dirt, I came across this on Amazon:

Yes, it's a Mud Pie Baby Princess utensil set.  The opposing images boggle my mind, but culturally, it all makes sense.

So the take home message, one which I emphasize in my physical anthropology class:  throw your children in the mud, get them dirty, let them play with pets, all in the name of health (but not the month old babies).  We have an immune system that will attack itself if not given appropriate targets.

And, the early training in a healthy habit such as exercise, will pay off over the course of a life.

Numbers to Treat: extending care till it harms

The medical community wants to help.  The pharmaceutical industry wants profits, to develop new drugs.  The consumer is the source.  How women without true osteoporosis are convinced to take bone density drugs that may, in the long run, create the problems they all seek to avoid is described very well in the article (link below), part of an NPR series on our health care system.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121609815