Learned Helplessness and Your Chances of Dying

Yesterday I received an intriguing report whose purpose was to point out the very real risks in taking medications as part of a preventative or disease management regimen. The article researched the risks of various ‘voluntary’ activities: non-critical medical therapies, job and transportation choices, and hobbies, and computed the comparative risk of fatality (in annual deaths per 100,000 persons engaging in these activities for an average length of time each year). Some of the data are shown in the upper part of the chart above.

These data are global averages, and clearly the danger varies greatly according to your place of residence and work, your age, current health and other variables. Nevertheless, it was an interesting illustration of the degree to which we mentally miscalculate the risks we face in our everyday lives, seeing some things as much safer than they really are (e.g. firefighting) and other things as much more dangerous than they really are (e.g. drowsy driving).

This delusion of danger, and the illusion that something can or has to be done, that someone — British cows, Canadian farmers, Chinese cats, Firestone, Saddam Hussein — must be brought to account in order to give us back control, is literally making us all crazy. It causes us to believe we cannot let children out of our sight even for a moment. It causes us to wildly change our diets, to avoid visiting whole countries, to fingerprint whole nations of visitors, to suspend civil liberties, to put barbed wire around our communities, to drink only bottled water, to wear masks, to introduce five levels of increasingly hysterical ‘threat’ to everyone’s safety.

• The chances of dying from any of these things (unless you commute to work by motorcycle) is very small, at least in affluent nations. Worldwide, you are twice as likely to die of cancer (ten times as likely if you live in an affluent nation) and twice as likely to die from heart disease (ten times as likely if you live in an affluent nation) as from lower respiratory infections, the #1 infectious disease group. 
• The chances of dying from murder, war or suicide varies enormously between demographics, from near the top of the list (for a few geographic areas and age groups) to negligible (for everyone else). As most of us know, if you are murdered, it’s almost certainly by someone you knew well and who you considered very capable of murder, rather than by some crazed suicide bomber or terrorist. The US has spent, in recent years, a trillion dollars in a futile ‘war on terror’, ostensibly to reduce the risk of terrorist attacks on the US. The amount it has spent on the the much higher risks in the chart above is paltry by any standard.
• In struggling nations, or if you’re poor, the chances of dying from the infectious diseases above rises dramatically, by a factor of 10 or more.
• As I said yesterday, don’t take medications you don’t have to.
• You have a lot more control over the risks you face than you think. Alert driving (i.e. not driving when you’re sleepy; not using a cell-phone or fooling with your radio or mp3 player while you drive; not being distracted by others in the vehicle) reduces the risk by at least 75%, far more than any combination of safety devices. Most of our learned helplessness is illusory, and plays right into the hands of politicians, preachers, fearmongers, marketers and corporatists.
• It is no accident that we have no idea where to put very profitable (politically and/or economically) hazards on this chart, because the data is unavailable: consumption of foods, medicines and cosmetics full of toxins and untested ingredients, the toxins we use in our homes and yards, chronic exposure to air and water pollution, staying in an abusive family etc. If we could isolate these data, I’m sure they would rank near the top of the list. But if we found that most cancers, heart diseases and immune system related deaths were due to agricultural and industrial toxins (picture a bar at the top of this chart twice as long as the motorcycle commuter one) what would we be prepared to do about it?

If there’s any justification for learned helplessness, it’s these little bugs. If we continue to sit by and allow industry and agriculture to poison us and destroy our immune systems, and continue to help diseases morph in new and dangerous ways by our reckless and extravagant use of antimicrobials, we’ll soon be justified in feeling helpless. That’s why I’m so interested in pandemic preparedness: It’s only a matter of time, and worldwide we know so little and are still so unready.

Until then, we have no excuse for learned helplessness — if we really want to live in a world that is healthy and safe, we need to stop the politically expedient and insanely expensive distractions of the ‘war on terror’ and the ‘war on drugs’ and the ‘war on crime’ and focus on the real, and very controllable risks, we create for ourselves: cleaning up our planet, taking responsibility for our own (and our loved ones’ and community members’) health and safety, putting corporate polluters behind bars and shutting them down, and making it easier to eat right, easier to know when we shouldn’t be driving or working, and easier to know when medical treatments are moredangerous than the disease.