Turn on the television and you won’t have to wait long to see a story about the new magic drug or food. America likes nothing better than a magic pill to solve whatever is wrong. Odds are that the medical study praising the magic drug or food will in six months be pushed out of mind by another study saying the opposite. The problem is that these studies and the media view the human body as simple. It isn’t simple – it’s an incredibly complex suite of systems. The same magic food that in abundance is shown to prevent cancer in one part of the body might be shown to cause cancer in another part of the body.
David Agus’s book, The End of Illness, makes the argument that we need to accept the complexity of the body if we want to have long lived health. Agus is an oncologist and a professor at the University of Southern California. While Agus argues that the body is extremely complex, he also summarizes a lot of what he says into a simple point – many of the things that go wrong in our bodies can be traced to inflammation. He says that we should “take charge of hidden, sneaky sources of chronic inflammation that can trigger illness and disease by wearing comfortable shoes daily, getting an annual flu vaccine, and asking your doctor why you’re not on a statin and baby aspirin if you’re over the age of forty.”
I love books that toss conventional wisdom on its head – and this book does that.
Here is a video of Dr. Agus being interviewed by Connie Chung:
