Saturday 12 July 2008

Achieving Wellness, Whatever THAT Is

2 Books on Illness and Wellness Give Opposite Advice is a cautionary tale from the NYTimes on the art and science of living:
"Both are practicing physicians who have made second careers interpreting medical principles for a lay audience. Both consider themselves experts not only in illness but also in wellness, that shimmering grail of our time. Both have combed through all the latest studies and are now pleased to provide you, the average healthy adult, with guidelines for staying well.

Both muster science, statistics and a judicious smattering of personal experience to present, with no small fanfare, completely, utterly, diametrically opposite advice."


as the article says,
"You, reader, have undoubtedly already decided which author is a sage and which one a lunatic, which advice is sound, worthy of reading and re-reading, and which is simply misguided."
and therein a fundamental flaw with the whole field of applied learning, the invisibility of The Myth. Believing our myths, inescapably, we take one side or the other the same way we align with baseball teams, rock bands or brands of toothpaste.