Howard Simons, once a science writer and later an editor during the Washington Post's inquiry into Watergate, late in life was diagnosed with cancer.
"Oh, good," he said. "Now I won't have to worry about cholesterol."
I suppose he was putting up a brave front--he subsequently died of the cancer--but I've always remembered the story because it indicates how we struggle these days with one simple solution or another to bad health.
Cholesterol has been a villain to good health ever since I started writing about medicine. In its wake have come a host of other perils and prescriptions for remedying them. For years health wizards have been trying to connect coffee with insidious inroads into being well, just as they have with tobacco.
So far, coffee, at least in moderation, seems harmless enough, though I once knew a guy who drank 40 cups a day. When he talked to his doctor about it, the doctor said, "Well, you'll probably never have kidney trouble."
Staying healthy seems to me to be a continual struggle. For awhile it was oat bran, which was going to get rid of cholesterol. The wife of a friend of mine thought this the case, and for months fed her husband oat bran in any conceivable form--oat bran muffins, oatmeal, oatmeal bread. If she could have found a drink with oat bran in it, she'd probably have tried that, too.
The poor husband's cholesterol didn't drop much--the stress of eating all that oat bran probably had something to do with it--but I suppose his wife felt health-right-eous. She'd done her best to kill that evil cholesterol with oat bran.
Then there was jogging, which was to exercise the heart and produce looser veins and arteries, better muscle tone and longer life. It wasn't until bad knees and ankles and the first signs of arthritis began to appear that jogging began to wane.
Joggers still appear now and then in my neighborhood, though not in the quantity they once did. I'm not sure if they are older or younger joggers. If they're older, I guess they believe it worked. If they're younger, they don't know yet.
Aspirin, that universal remedy, is another panacea. One minor dose a day keeps your heart healthy--it supposedly slows your blood clotting mechanism down and presumably thus retards the formation of the blood clots that cause strokes and heart attacks.
And heart attacks bring coronary artery bypasses, which once seemed to be performed in every hospital a dozen times a day. Now, however, they are giving way to angioplasty, those little balloons they insert in your arteries to expand and presumably clear out the plaque that clogs up the arterial lumen. But angioplasty may not be that longlasting, so stents have come along, little steel mesh sections inserted in the artery and expanded like an umbrella (well, sort of), so the artery stays open more permanently.
Brain tumors have been blamed on cellular telephones; skin cancer on too much sun; "bad" genes for everything from mental illness to alcoholism. Dentists first touted fluoride as a way to prevent tooth decay. Use it enough and you won't have any cavities.
They've had the same to say about granulated sugar. Recently, it's been flossing. Using a mouthwash also is good, my dental hygienist tells me. It kills the germs that make plaque--this is a different kind of bad plaque; this kind sticks to your teeth, not to the walls of your arteries.
Back in the old days, you were guaranteed good dental health if you brushed your teeth twice a day. That didn't work either, though it made you feel righteous if you brushed your teeth right after breakfast and after dinner. I brushed my teeth twice a day when I was a teenager and ended up one summer with 16 cavities. The dentist had the dentist next door come in for a look. He'd never seen anything like it.
My mother had a hissie. She had me brush my teeth three times a day. That didn't stop the cavities either, but it kept successive dentists happy fitting me with crowns
Now that I've grown older, I've become aware of the prostate gland, which tends to fail men in their later years. No one knows why the prostate doesn't last forever, just as they don't know why women get breast cancer. Mine seems to be all right--at least it's still intact--but you just never know.
Some researchers say prostate cancer comes from too much fat. But then fat in the diet or on the person also gets blamed for everything from heart disease to a faulty prostate. Fat is like plastic these days--it's everywhere. Or maybe being fat or being unable do anything with fat except suffer is in the genes, too.
Well, we'll soon know if the Human Genome Project (mapping all of mankind's--and womankind's--genes) reaches fruition. One wonders what will happen then. Probably they'll discover a gene that has something to do with oat bran, and we'll be right back where we started.
Have a cup of black coffee.
Willow Glen, California Since 1992
