Dr. Lisa Marcucci, a trauma surgeon and Associate Professor of Surgery, recently did an interview with me for her very successful blog Inside Surgery. It was an opportunity for me to think about why I blog, among many other things. I talked much more freely about myself than I ever do on my own blog.
The interview is quite long and will be posted in three parts. Here’s an excerpt from Part 1, where Dr. Marcucci asks about the mission of my blog.
I started blogging because I wanted to understand something that changed medicine and ideas about health in the 1970s. Prior to that time, the policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had assumed the state should be responsible for the health of its citizens. When political and economic thinking became more conservative in the 1970s and 1980s, governments began to promote the idea that individuals were personally responsible for their health and should practice healthy lifestyles.
A large segment of the population – mainly the educated and economically secure – welcomed these ideas. Feeling personally responsible for one’s health and practicing healthy lifestyles gives one the reassuring illusion of control. In particular, it’s a good distraction from the things that are beyond individual control, like salmonella in our peanut butter and the superbug MRSA at the gym.
