What I'm Reading (July 19)

Tis the season to be outside and for the feast of the mosquito to begin. My wife is a mosquito magnet; I am not. Reactions, a video from the American Chemical Society series, explains.

Those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it.

“The seeds of what would eventually become the civil-rights movement included not only mass protest and political mobilization but a wide array of cultural and artistic expressions. Some of them—Frank Sinatra’s song and short film The House I Live In; a Superman radio serial pitting the Man of Steel against a thinly veiled version of the Ku Klux Klan—sought nothing less than a redefinition of American identity that would embrace racial and religious minorities. In his 1945 film, Sinatra came to the defense of a Jewish boy menaced by a gentile mob. On the radio serial a year later, Superman protected a Chinese American teenager from the lethal assault of the “Clan of the Fiery Cross.” The lyrics of The House I Live In captured the new ethos: “The faces that I see / All races and religions / That’s America to me.”

Here from The Atlantic is a bit of our forgotten cultural history. The Writers Who Went Undercover to Show America Its Ugly Side

Consider this sentence, “Among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems.” Could that possibly be true?

“The English epidemiologist Michael Marmot wrote, “Scientific findings do not fall on blank minds that get made up as a result. Science engages with busy minds that have strong views about how things are and ought to be. … The ice-cream saga shows how this plays out in practice.”

Ice cream is good; we have been lied to. From The Atlantic, Could Ice Cream Possibly Be Good for You?

Perhaps you remember Mad Men, the television series about the Madison Avenue types in the 50s and 60s. My father-in-law was a Mad Man, handling Coca-Cola’s print buys. But here is a take on how advertising has shaped our consumption of medical care.

“A pacemaker is a simple device that can be lifesaving, essentially a low-voltage clock used to speed up and regulate a slow or sloppy heart rate. It was developed in the late 1950s and patented in 1962. Since then, the technology has not changed much. … the design was pretty perfect.

The problem for an ad agency is that there was nothing new to sell. So our strategy team came up with a new approach: chronotropic incompetence. …chronotropic incompetence was defined as the inability to increase the heart rate adequately during exercise to match cardiac output. But that clinical condition, [is] the normal baseline as people aged into their 70s and their heart rate became gradually less responsive to exertion.

But why should the elderly live with slower heart rates and ragged breathing? This was our clients’ epiphany.”

Why indeed. A look at how advertising made us consumers of health care rather than patients. From Tablet Magazine, Med Men