Laban reviewed Natural Causes by Barbara Ehrenreich
Interesting, but at times scattered
3 stars
Borrowed this from my library after watching a video discussing links between wellness culture and eugenics that cited this book at several points. Ehrenreich's best and most interesting arguments are about how: - A fixation on prevention comes at little benefit at best and, at worst, can become a waste of physical, mental, and financial energy. - Many aspects of how medicine is practiced and administered is not based on evidence, but rather ritual. - Wellness culture and particularly the recently popularized practice of mindfulness is basically sanitized, gentrified Buddhism but with aspects critical of hoarding wealth conveniently filtered out
These arguments are in the first half of the book. The second half lost me a bit with several of the tangents. The most egregious was a half-baked one about smoking, where she criticizes anti-smoking campaigns as classist and points out how it helped with building relationships and reducing stress. …
Borrowed this from my library after watching a video discussing links between wellness culture and eugenics that cited this book at several points. Ehrenreich's best and most interesting arguments are about how: - A fixation on prevention comes at little benefit at best and, at worst, can become a waste of physical, mental, and financial energy. - Many aspects of how medicine is practiced and administered is not based on evidence, but rather ritual. - Wellness culture and particularly the recently popularized practice of mindfulness is basically sanitized, gentrified Buddhism but with aspects critical of hoarding wealth conveniently filtered out
These arguments are in the first half of the book. The second half lost me a bit with several of the tangents. The most egregious was a half-baked one about smoking, where she criticizes anti-smoking campaigns as classist and points out how it helped with building relationships and reducing stress. These are all likely true to a certain extent. The argument seems to be that it may be "unhealthy" to smoke in a physical sense, but it can be "healthy" in a social sense. If smoking only affected the smoker and not the people around them, it'd be stronger. This tangent conveniently omits the impacts of secondhand smoke, however, which on its own is enough to justify the intensity of the anti-smoking campaign. And that's not to mention how god-awful the smell is.
The core argument, if you could say there is one, becomes reductive at points in seemingly criticizing any attempt to promote physical health that isn't in reaction to any immediate issue. It does have a point, however, in observing that it can hurt more than help to obsess over being "the healthiest," and scoffing at arrogant Silicon Valley entrepreneurs is never unwelcome.