Following on from yesterday, another part of Rose Cartwright’s article caught my eye:
If the medical model is willing to examine its assumptions, it may admit that its research is often a repackaging of knowledge that the west has forgotten or destroyed. Every year, studies are published “proving” that things like nature, creativity, exercise and community make us happier, framing them as prescriptions for ills rather than age-old preventives.
If the medical model is willing to examine its assumptions, it may admit that its research is often a repackaging of knowledge that the west has forgotten or destroyed. Every year, studies are published “proving” that things like nature, creativity, exercise and community make us happier, framing them as prescriptions for ills rather than age-old preventives.
The idea of prescription versus preventive speaks to something I’ve come across elsewhere1; that there is something structurally very wrong with a society that has to prescribe those things that should be part and parcel of people’s lives, in order to cure the ‘ills’ arguably caused by the demotion of the very same things in favour of productivity and such.
- Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks certainly touches on it, but given I don’t currently have a copy, I can’t quote from it
