Glob-a-log

Ah well, here I thought it was terrorism and global warming which were going to get us – and now it seems it’s much more of a teenage DIY thing:

TEENAGERS are destroying their health with drink, drugs and cigarettes, Britain’s top medic warned yesterday. Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson said unprotected sex and a lack of exercise were also putting them in peril. It revealed that more than a third of 11 to 15-year-old regularly get drunk, almost ten per cent smoke and half are coach potatoes. Some 300,000 are classed as obese and 170,000 have taken Class A drugs.

Now, far from me to quibble when a Chief Medical Officer speaks out but truly, Sir Liam: a lack of exercise AND unprotected sex…? It must have been a while since our Chief M.O. had sex himself, because it can be quite a workout…

Anyway, on a slightly more serious note: I am sure Sir Liam is right in saying that many teenagers are not exactly models of health – but then again, they really shouldn’t be. Being a teenager is all about feeling immortal and experimenting with all kinds of exciting and new stuff. Yes, that might lead to accidents, and even some deaths, but that has always been the case.

I’m sure that when we all still lived in trees, our old forefathers were complaining about those damn kids insisting to climb too high and putting too much trust in dangerously thin and brittle branches. Okay, alcohol, drugs and TV were not an option then but I’m sure there must have been some equivalent of our Chief Medical Officer disapproving of the unacceptable risks those tree-dwelling kids took – though at least unprotected sex was not seen as one of them, in those days.

Anyway, as long as we have had more or less organised societies the grown-ups have always asserted that the next generation was going to the dogs. Certainly, these days, in the West at least, there are many more things our kids can buy – and many of these things are not really healthy – but it would be stupid to assume that Western civilisation will come to a grinding halt because of what teenagers do (to themselves.)

Again, some kids will overdose and die, or drunk drive and die, or find other ways to kill themselves in more modern (or traditional) fashions but we’re really not talking about catastrophic amounts. What’s more, especially a medical expert should know better than to pander to the ‘We’re all doomed!’ crowd.

Not so long ago, a third of pregnant women died when giving birth. Infant mortality was high and most serious diseases were incurable. Any idea how many kids have their appendix removed? Well, not so long ago almost all who had appendicitis just died. Need I go on?

At least in the West, life expectancy has risen by more than a decade in less than a century - and our overall health has improved in ways our great grandparents would not have thought possible. Yes, with this increased wealth and increased health, some new problems have arisen. It would certainly not hurt the national health if people had more sensible diets, and drank less, and became physically a bit more active. All of that would be nice but let’s not all pretend that we are on the brink of some grand (and gross) collapse – because we are not.

All this worrying about our teenagers’ health is part of a larger and disturbing trend though: Nowadays, people constantly worry about their health: about E numbers in food, passive smoking, and all the other various things that can give us cancer or other dreadful diseases – and all that when our life expectancies have been rising steadily for the last decades. For the last fifty years doctors, politicians and opinion makers have been telling us that the way we live is killing us.

All of that is bullshit. Look at the statistics: we live longer and healthier lives than at any point in time (in the West) that we have kept national records.

Yes, we’re all going to die eventually but can we please stop obsessing over it in the meantime? Oh, and give those teenagers a break, when you’re at it. They’re the ones who will inherit all the messes we have been making, so let them have some fun for now.

Soon enough they will be forced to take over from us and make their own messes, to leave for those who come after them - and then they can moan that the next generation is going to Hell in an eco-friendly handcart.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 20:38 and is filed under Columns, Satire, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.