Reposted from 2005
Everything is so scary.
You can drown in the bathtub, you can cut yourself with a chain saw, you can choke on a steak, you can spill hot coffee in your lap, you can slice your finger with a paring knife, you can get fat from eating bread, you can get hit by an SUV, you can get heart disease from french fries, you can get blinded by a tennis ball, you can get brain-death from watching TV, you can catch mono from kissing a girl, you can fall down the stairs, you can get hit by lightning playing golf, you can lose your sense of reality by studying astronomy, you can get Lyme disease from weeding the garden, you can get a rusty hook in your scalp while fishing, you can get skin cancer from going outdoors, you can get a papercut from copy-paper.
Given how treacherous ordinary life is, it should be no wonder that all medical treatments, including medicines, have side-effects too. The recent pulling of Viox and Celebrex from the market puzzle me, because ordinary aspirin seems far more dangerous due to its frequent ability to cause gastric bleeding. Still, every MD I know takes an aspirin a day, not to combat paperwork headaches but to prevent heart attack.
My point is not to specifically discuss medical care - I think almost everyone assumes that physicians know how to balance risk, and, nowadays, how to discuss these with patients. When people exercise judgement in life, they not only balance the risks and rewards of choices of action, they also balance the risks and rewards of action vs. inaction. Inaction always has its own cost - opportunity cost. Every fellow who ever contemplated asking a girl out knows what I mean. Or vice versa. My point is to talk about the expectation that life should be safe, and that someone (the gummint?) could or should magically protect us from that reality. That, I think, is part of the infantile impulse behind the wish for the Nanny State. Or the Mommy and Daddy State.
This is not to promote a radical libertarian viewpoint. I like the Pure Food Act, and I am glad kids can't buy guns and dynamite. And I don't want to have to caveat emptor in everything I use or buy...but you kinda sorta have to anyway, don't you? Still, the endless seeking to be made safe from risk is a psychological state - a wish that reality be a certain way - and, as such, it is not amenable to correction by adjusting reality. It can only be corrected by growing up ...and by hamstringing the tort lawyers who have fed off, promoted, and exploited, these childish wishes that sometimes lurk even in the most mature people, including me.
