Fear Of Diseases

• Organic food to industrial chemicals, from radiation to mobile phone towers, the new technologies of our modern world have offered us wonderful new benefits, which also pose a host of new risks.
• ...Toxicologists, epidemiologists and risk experts study the physical perils one hazard at a time. But the cumulative load of modern threats may be creating an even greater risk that is largely overlooked: the risk that arises from misperceiving risks as higher or lower than they actually are. Our bodies react to chronically elevated levels of stress, the hazards of risk misperception may be more significant than any of the individual risks about which we fret.
  
  Why are so many afraid of so much? More broadly, our modern apprehensions are in part an outgrowth of the post-World War Two industrial–technological–information age that has given us both the benefits and the risks of everything from plastics to pesticides, nuclear power to mobile phones, biotechnology to global travel, and more.
  
  Interestingly, although the universe of 'information voices' is larger than it has ever been, the ownership of those voices, aside from the world wide web, is in fewer hands than most of us realize,
  
  But it is still insufficient to blame our industrial–technological–information age for our fears. Another fundamental component is more basic to human nature. The study of risk perception reveals that our responses to risks are not simply internal 'rational' risk analyses, but also intuitive 'affective' responses that apply our emotions, values and instincts as we try to judge danger. Risk perception helps to explain why our fears often do not match the facts.
  
  The more uncertain we are, the more we protect ourselves with precaution and fear. If all the scientific answers are not to hand, as with many biotechnologies, concern will be higher.
  
  • Can it happen to me?
  
  Any risk seems larger if you think you or someone you care about could be a victim. This helps to explain why statistical probability is often an ineffective form of risk communication. A risk of 1 in 1,000,000 can still seem threatening if you think you could be the one. This helps explain why the only acceptable level of risk to many people is zero.
  
  Take the ugly face of Pharma industry practising the doctrine of "Fear , Forever , Faith " is exposed in the following interesting article which I read recently .
  There is a confluence of interests among pharmaceutical corporations,supposedly independent scientific institutions that lead the market, individual doctors whose role becomes more and more important as well as their income. Even patients associations are often supported with the funds of the pharma. industry.
  “The term “disease mongering” means literally the selling of sickness. It was used for the first time in 1992 by the physiologist and medical journalist Lynn Payer (1945-2001) who became famous when she published her first book in 1988 “Medicine and culture” where she critiqued medicine for focusing its interests around scientific proofs and neglecting the non repeatable singularity of the individuals.
  Since it is not easy to distinguish normality from pathology, doctors, pharmaceutical companies and medical diagnostic industry were extending the diagnosis criteria in a way to increase the demand for services and products.
  The system is implemented in three steps:
  1) transforming common complaints into medical problems, (Fear)
  2) making them look dangerous (Forever) and
  3) proposing therapies whose benefits are highly praised while their risks are underestimated. (Faith)
  By doing so, enormous economical resources are then removed from the treatment of people who are really ill to a larger mass of people that are not sick.
  It is highly ironical that a big business is able to convince substantially healthy people that they are a little bit sick or slightly sick people to
  be seriously ill....
  
  
  What can we do? We cannot roll back the technological and information ages in which we live. Furthermore, we cannot undo what appear to be deeply ingrained patterns of psychological responses to risks.
  
  “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.”
  
  
  Jayasala 42