Minority Health Month Quotes

If you improve your health or your relationships or your professional knowledge only 1% each day, after one month this will amount to a 30% increase. After one year this will amount to a 365% increase. By devoting yourself to continuous improvement and excellence in minor ways each day, your life really can transform.

It’s not like I wasn’t busy. I was an officer in good standing of my kids’ PTA. I owned a car that put my comfort ahead of the health and future of the planet. I had an IRA and a 401(k) and I went on vacations and swam with dolphins and taught my kids to ski. I contributed to the school’s annual fund. I flossed twice a day; I saw a dentist twice a year. I got Pap smears and had my moles checked. I read books about oppressed minorities with my book club. I did physical therapy for an old knee injury, forgoing the other things I’d like to do to ensure I didn’t end up with a repeat injury. I made breakfast. I went on endless moms’ nights out, where I put on tight jeans and trendy blouses and high heels like it mattered and went to the restaurant that was right next to the restaurant we went to with our families. (There were no dads’ nights out for my husband, because the supposition was that the men got to live life all the time, whereas we were caged animals who were sometimes allowed to prowl our local town bar and drink the blood of the free people.) I took polls on whether the Y or the JCC had better swimming lessons. I signed up for soccer leagues in time for the season cutoff, which was months before you’d even think of enrolling a child in soccer, and then organized their attendant carpools. I planned playdates and barbecues and pediatric dental checkups and adult dental checkups and plain old internists and plain old pediatricians and hair salon treatments and educational testing and cleats-buying and art class attendance and pediatric ophthalmologist and adult ophthalmologist and now, suddenly, mammograms. I made lunch. I made dinner. I made breakfast. I made lunch. I made dinner. I made breakfast. I made lunch. I made dinner.

A True Story Let me tell you about Wendy. For more than ten years, Wendy struggled unsuccessfully with ulcerative colitis. A thirty-six-year-old grade school teacher and mother of three, she lived with constant cramping, diarrhea, and frequent bleeding, necessitating occasional blood transfusions. She endured several colonoscopies and required the use of three prescription medications to manage her disease, including the highly toxic methotrexate, a drug also used in cancer treatment and medical abortions. I met Wendy for an unrelated minor complaint of heart palpitations that proved to be benign, requiring no specific treatment. However, she told me that, because her ulcerative colitis was failing to respond to medications, her gastroenterologist advised colon removal with creation of an ileostomy. This is an artificial orifice for the small intestine (ileum) at the abdominal surface, the sort to which you affix a bag to catch the continually emptying stool. After hearing Wendy’s medical history, I urged her to try wheat elimination. “I really don’t know if it’s going to work,” I told her, “but since you’re facing colon removal and ileostomy, I think you should give it a try.” “But why?” she asked. “I’ve already been tested for celiac and my doctor said I don’t have it.” “Yes, I know. But you’ve got nothing to lose. Try it for four weeks. You’ll know if you’re responding.” Wendy was skeptical but agreed to try. She returned to my office three months later, no ileostomy bag in sight. “What happened?” I asked. “Well, first I lost thirty-eight pounds.” She ran her hand over her abdomen to show me. “And my ulcerative colitis is nearly gone. No more cramps or diarrhea. I’m off everything except my Asacol.” (Asacol is a derivative of aspirin often used to treat ulcerative colitis.) “I really feel great.” In the year since, Wendy has meticulously avoided wheat and gluten and has also eliminated the Asacol, with no return of symptoms. Cured. Yes, cured. No diarrhea, no bleeding, no cramps, no anemia, no more drugs, no ileostomy. So if Wendy’s colitis tested negative for celiac antibodies, but responded to—indeed, was cured by—wheat gluten elimination, what should we label it? Should we call it antibody-negative celiac disease? Antibody-negative wheat intolerance? There is great hazard in trying to pigeonhole conditions such as Wendy’s into something like celiac disease. It nearly caused her to lose her colon and suffer the lifelong health difficulties associated with colon removal, not to mention the embarrassment and inconvenience of wearing an ileostomy bag. There is not yet any neat name to fit conditions such as Wendy’s, despite its extraordinary response to the elimination of wheat gluten. Wendy’s experience highlights the many unknowns in this world of wheat sensitivities, many of which are as devastating as the cure is simple.

Suppose someone says, it’s possible to jump off a 200 feet cliff without any aid and survive. 99 percent of those that try end up dying. But by some miracle, this guy survives, while doing the exact same thing with the exact method that killed 99 percent of the people. He later, proudly proclaims, “See! it’s possible to jump off a 200 feet high cliff and survive! Never mind the fact that I spent 6 months in a Coma and am now paralyzed FOR LIFE, but I survived! Anyone can do it as long as you believe in yourself! In business, the most common synonym for this is –” Work 18-hour days! Take no days off! No pain, no gain! Don’t change even if the entire world tells you that you are wrong! Sleep only when you are dead!” Other entrepreneurs listen to that and try to replicate it sincerely. But most fail anyway while also ruining their health, finances and personal life. What they don’t realize is that just because a tiny minority survived or even thrived using this approach, doesn’t mean it is the right approach, because if it was, it would work for most people who followed it sincerely, but it doesn’t.

The auditors reported a scene of pure chaos. “Drugs were given to the wrong babies, documents were altered, and there was infrequent follow-up, even though one third of the mothers were marked ‘abnormal’ in their charts at discharge. The infants who did receive follow-up care were, in many cases, small and alarmingly underweight. ‘It was thought to be likely that some, perhaps many, of these infants had serious health problems.’”16 When Westat chose a random sample of forty-three of those infants to examine, all of them had “adverse events” twelve months after the study terminated. Only eleven of them were HIV positive.17 When Westat confronted Dr. Jackson’s researchers with study discrepancies, they admitted that they routinely applied more lenient standards for their Black Ugandan subjects than FDA rules required for US safety studies.18 The PIs admitted to systematically downgrading standardized definitions of serious adverse events to adapt to “local standards.” Injuries that researchers would score as “serious” or “deadly” if they happened to white Americans became “minor” injuries when Black Africans were the victims. Under their relaxed rubric, clinical trials staff scored “life-threatening” injuries as “not serious.” When they reported them at all, NIAID classified mortalities among its African volunteers as “serious adverse events,” rather than “death.” NIAID’s Ugandan team had entirely neglected to report thousands of adverse events and at least fourteen deaths.19

But this obsession with the most minor activities of our everyday life means that they function as a kind of highly charged political battleground. The result is that struggles are no longer fought over political ideologies. Instead, the politics we become passionately invested in are those that are closely related to our habits and bodies. Indeed we become deeply interested in what some have called ‘bio-politics’ (Foucault, 1978). Broadly put, this involves political contestation focusing on life itself (Esposito, 2008). This means political struggles take place around the most basic aspects such as bodily health and lifestyle. No big ideas here. The pressing political questions are no longer your position on patriarchy – it is how many burgers you ate this month or where you stand on spray-tanning. The increasing importance of this kind of bio-politics can be seen in the fact that many contemporary political movements today are focused on quotidian issues close to the body such as health, food and lifestyle. And one of the central demands which is often bound up with these bio-political movements is a demand for authenticity – real food, real wine, real music and the ability to live a real life which is not artificially clouded by various in-authenticities.

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