The Boring, Oldfangled Way to Health : Low tech is alive and well in an age of pricey specialists and million-dollar medical gadgets
How good it is, in an age of high-tech and high-cost health care, to find that there are still plenty of simple, cheap things that can be done to help ward off illnesses that are not just life-threatening but often enormously expensive to treat. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and prevention that costs next to nothing is especially valuable.
The old folk wisdom about eating more “roughage”--today we call it fiber--now has solid scientific support. Meals rich in grains, vegetables and fruits are high in fiber and appear to reduce the risk of both heart disease and certain cancers, in part because the fiber tends to substitute for dietary fat. That old standby, aspirin, which has been around for nearly a century, is now known to be effective not just in reducing pain and inflammation but, at a dosage of about half a tablet a day, in lowering the risk of heart attacks and strokes. And there’s more.
Research published in the current New England Journal of Medicine has found that long-term use of aspirin appears to cut by about 44% the risk of developing colon and rectal cancer. The research is part of the Nurses’ Health Study, a continuing survey of more than 120,000 female nurses that has been going on since 1976. Colon and rectal cancer is second only to lung cancer in cancer-caused deaths. An estimated 138,000 Americans a year are stricken, and the disease kills more than 55,000 annually.
The study of nurses found that those who took as few as four to six aspirins a week considerably lowered their risk of colorectal cancer. It’s important to note that the benefit didn’t begin to show up until after at least a decade of use, and it’s only after 20 years that the advantages became statistically clear. Why are the benefits slow to materialize? Some experts speculate that aspirin works only on the earliest stages of the disease, by stopping the growth of polyps that over time could become cancerous. (Individuals of course vary in their responses to drugs, and it’s always prudent to seek a physician’s advice before taking aspirin or anything else long-term.)
The march of medical science continues to produce some marvelous new tools for the diagnosis and treatment of illness. At the same time, we’re happy to see, research continues to validate the effectiveness of some decidedly old-hat, kind-of-boring ways to help us keep from getting sick.
Onward and upward with medical research, by all means. But don’t rule out the occasional benefits of backward and downward as well.
