When I first approached Why
Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers I was skeptical. I
thought that the idea that stress could cause illness was an excuse used by
doctors to explain illnesses that they couldn’t find a specific cause for.
However, Sapolsky makes a very convincing argument in this book that stress
does in fact play a role in the illness process. However, he is careful to
point out, “it is never really the case that stress makes you sick, or even
increases your risk of being sick. Stress increases your risk of getting diseases that make you sick” (16).
Although this may seem like an
insignificant point, Sapolsky brings it up again in the beginning of Chapter
17, when he discusses how social status can affect health. He describes two
camps of thinking about poor health with biomedicine on the one hand full of
people who think that “poor health revolves around issues of bacteria, viruses,
genetic mutations, and so on” and on the other hand “folks anchored in
mind-body issues, for whom poor health is about psychological stress, lack of
control and efficacy, and so on” (353). He criticizes both of these extremes
and instead argues that biological disease must be considered within a personal
and social context.
I thought that this was a
compelling argument and it reminded me of what I thought one of the main
arguments of The Starting Gate was,
namely that we would benefit from considering the ways in which biology and
sociology intersect with one another. As a pre-med, biology major, I think that
I often tend to side with the reductive biology extreme and am skeptical of
social explanations for illnesses, but this book has opened up my point of view
and helped me to understand how social factors like stress can indirectly lead
to illnesses through biological processes.
I agree. Although this is "so last week", this reading exemplifies the societal and external effects on physical health and has further solidified the notion of environmentally related illness. Can it only be attributed to society or external factors? Of course not, but the intersection of biology and society is made very transparent and has been eloquently put forth in Sapolsky's writing. It seems as though this reading was deliberately assigned after The Starting Gate to put the debate to rest.
ReplyDeleteI know low-birth weight was not examined in Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers but would it be unlikely that stress is a factor? It is very hard to side exclusively with either extreme (reductive biology/societal factors) and personally, I think the debate is futile. These conceptual frameworks should not be isolated but rather integrated to better understand how they function conjunctively.
I also found the arguments in Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" a compelling read. Sapolsky makes his points transparent. Awareness and understanding of the role stress can take on in impacting people's decisions and subsequent life trajectories may be important as a tool for dissecting social quandaries. One thing that came to mind while reading this book was the anecdote Prof. Conley gave in class about the marshmallow experiment. The outcome of the experiment was that children who failed the deferred gratification test tended to experience less success in later life. Experimenters found decisive differences in brain imaging results between the two groups. I wondered whether control of stress could potentially be a factor in diminishing the successfulness of the children in later life.
ReplyDeleteOverall, the presentation of social and biological factors in joint causation of health problems seemed to be natural to modern life.