It’s time to get smart about the health choices we’re making.
I learned in Economics 101 that people usually make rational money decisions. The financial crisis made it crystal clear that this isn’t true—it was nutty to believe that housing prices would rise forever, or that Wall Street’s massively leveraged bets would never lose. I don’t know if I ever officially learned that people make rational health decisions. But I’m realizing more and more that that’s an equally ridiculous idea.
I think this not only because of the loud protests about vaccines (I recently admitted to my own irrational hesitation to get a seasonal flu shot on MORE.com), even though research clearly shows they prevent potentially serious conditions and have very few side effects. And not only because of a statistic I ran across showing that a whopping half of all people don’t take the medicines their doctor prescribes.
What really jolted me into reality was a recent study on surgical sterilization. For a man to get a vasectomy, the doctor makes a few laparoscopic slits in his tubing and home he goes. Sterilization for women requires either a more substantial operation--to slice the larger and duplicate fallopian tubes—or a newer product, Essure, that while less invasive, still requires that a foreign material is inserted into the tubes to make them scar. Yet the CDC reports that more wives than husbands have undergone a sterilization procedure. Why would that be? Ask any man who crosses his legs every time his partner brings up the idea of a vasectomy, as if the slicing involves a different part of his anatomy.
Yet making irrational health decisions has its down sides. If enough of us don’t get vaccinated for a disease, we run the risk of its widespread comeback (and nobody wants a polio redux). If we don’t take medicines that benefit us (usually because of such unscientific notions as we’re feeling better—even though the underlying problem remains—or we don’t like the idea of depending on a drug), we could get seriously ill. I recently spoke to a woman who stopped taking her daily asthma medicine for no good reason—until she had to be rushed to the ER. (Now she never misses a day.) And if we tie our own tubes, we’re subconsciously choosing as a couple to take on increased risk of complications.
I’m not sure how rational decision-making about our health can make a comeback. But a good first step is to recognize when the choices we are making aren't coming from the left side of our brain.
For more on smart choices, read "It's Different After 40: Update Your Stay-Healthy Strategies."