Today's doctors have become good at that. As Patients we now have lots of numbers to worry about. These numbers are supposed to represent our state of health: cholesterol numbers, blood pressure readings, blood sugar numbers, thyroid numbers, iron levels and now, bone density numbers. Where are the actual people here? We are rapidly identifying more with our lab results than with our state of well-being. Suddenly we feel all stressed out because we are a '6.4' when we should be a '5.8' (or something).
As a theory, reductionism really falls apart if we follow the thinking of microanalysis a little further. Modern medicine seems to feel that once the numbers are known, it is a simple thing to correct them, and then our bodies will be made whole and healthy again. Wrong! Getting your cholesterol under control, for instance, has proven to do nothing to protect you from heart disease.
Please let me illustrate this fallacy using osteoporosis as another example. Osteoporosis and its predecessor, osteopenia, are not new conditions by any definition. Nor are the x-ray tests that are commonly used to find them. Chiropractors have been concerned about these bone-weakening conditions for decades, for obvious reasons...we manually work with bones. We have also learned that we can still do our work in the presence of advanced osteoporosis, as long as we know it's there.
So why is this condition suddenly so popular? The cynic in me says that it is mainly popular for economic reasons. There's money and profit to be made in doctor's visits, lab tests, x-rays, the new drugs, and calcium supplements. This is not a factor that can be dismissed too lightly. Once the myths that result in windfall profits get rolling they are very hard to correct. The myth of cholesterol is a good example of that. Want another example? How about the recently exposed myth of hormone replacement therapy?
The real reason that osteoporosis is suddenly popular, even though chances are that our Grandmothers had it, is that we have a large baby boom population who, by and large are obsessed with their health. Ironically, this very obsession has led in large part to the problem of osteoporosis becoming a virtual epidemic. Let me explain.
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