Hooray! As per a new study out in the last few days, not only has coffee been rehabilitated heart-wise, it is now touted as being heart protective. The new study (funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Kaiser Permanente) suggests that dangerous heart arrhythmias are found to occur less often in people who are the heavier coffee drinkers. Of course, media reports of the study do not tell you which kind of coffee to drink, what time of the day to drink it or whether or not it operates the same way if you are taking it with Beta Blockers or whipped cream. Long ago my cynicism reached its now epic proportions concerning medical pronouncements when it became obvious from the conflicting studies that appeared on a regular basis in the media that all one needed to do was wait. You like to indulge in fried pig’s livers but were told that this is a death sentence for your circulatory system? Wait a few days and a new study may appear that will not only clear those livers of all harm but will exalt them to such a height they will be given their own float in the Rose Parade.
Don’t get me wrong. I love coffee, especially the kind that comes mit schlag in the wonderful cafes scattered so conveniently about the city of Vienna. When it was partially vilified by earlier studies, I continued to drink it. Now that coffee has been fussed over yet again by the medical establishment, my love for it has not increased. I drank it before, drink it now and will continue to drink it. Why? Because it tastes good (to me), has not caused any fatal complications as of yet and has a sophisticated complex of flavors and sensations that are appealing. That appeal is ancient and when coffee finally made its way into European salons it took off like a shot. There seems to be little or no evidence that its allure is fading anytime soon. Of course, everything needs to be approached sensibly, but that seems beyond the ken of our modern sawbones. Now that this study has given a green light to coffee drinking, I expect that Americans will put the pedal to the metal and start guzzling coffee like Ponce de Leon at the Fountain of Youth.
But isn’t this exactly the problem with the way that medicine is practiced? Physicians prescribe literally billions of drugs per year to Americans (see Greg Critser) but can only tell in the most general fashion who will suffer serious or even fatal side effects. Everything is a matter of percentage risk. Of course, herbs, teas, natural foods are off limits for most physicians to discuss with their patients because they cannot find “studies” which provide the probabilities of risk. Now that coffee has been the subject of a study and the numbers are in, their confidence swells like Tarzan’s pecs. What about the old studies? What all this is about is a professional narrative that medicine, especially American medicine, would like to have believed. That narrative is simple – we knew nothing before modern medicine came on the scene and we all owe our lives (and most of our fortunes) to the good doctors for the great benefits they have brought us. They have brought us great benefits indeed, but those need to be kept in perspective. Drugs which are enthusiastically marketed at one moment, become a deadly menace the next. Medical errors cost tens of thousands of lives a year. One cannot fault the medical profession entirely. It is really the American public that needs a good hiding for forgetting the simple lessons of their great-grandparents. With medicine, less is more.
This needs to be said more often! I think its an example of the mass neurosis American consumers seem to be stuck in.
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