A lot of the focus that the medical field has put toward fighting many kinds of diseases has been involved with the complexity of cellular structures, new medical discoveries which promise to make our lives longer and healthier, and the fancy new technologies that will ultimately enable us all to become super people who live to be a thousand years old. However, a lot of these scientists, for all of their intelligence and study, seem to forget that a lot of times, the easiest way to fight any kind of disease is also the one which involves technology the very least. And we are not just talking about low technology solutions, such as manually removing your appendix if you are going to go into an area where appendicitis runs rampant.
We are also talking about avoiding technology altogether, in situations where the overuse of technology has actively been linked to being a common vector for some type of ailment. For instance, how easy is it to simply back away from the computer and go out for a long, brisk walk in the outdoors as a means of combating obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease? Would it be easier than getting an angioplasty or a triple bypass a few years later? It most likely would.
One of the most serious problems we face when we assume that technology works best for combating most diseases is that we take the emphasis away from the ordinary individual. In much the same tradition as many societies have “wise men” who keep the important knowledge to themselves, in our society we use scientists, programmers and other intellectual elites as the go-to people for the solutions to our problems — even when we essentially produce those problems by the way we live our lives. Eating slightly better, exercising slightly more and not trying to jam a week’s worth of work into each day just might prolong and improve our lives.