Tuesday, July 3, 2007

News For Your Health!

I'd like to extend a note of thanks to my health care provider (or maybe it wasn't even mine - was it Kaiser or Premera or Fidelis? I forget) for sending me my regular health newsletter. Packed full of four pages of utterly useless shit, the flyer manages to wag its finger at me numerous times while doling out gobsmackingly obvious advice.

Included are stories about:

- How you should use sunscreen when lying in the sun for 12 hours.
- How you shouldn't eat expired cold cuts or raw chicken at a picnic.
- Why stress at work isn't good for you.
- How eating ten corn dogs at a sitting will make you belch.
- How exercise is good for you.
- How alcohol gel kills germs on your hands.

Great stuff, that. You forgot the articles about remembering not to stab your eye out with a steak knife, and why you shouldn't aim the wrong way and pee in your face. At first, I thought that maybe the entire world is filled with utter morons who have to be reminded that smoking makes you cough and to not play lawn darts with toddlers. But then I realized what this was really about.

If the health care provider told you all these great ways to "stay healthy," that kind of counts as preventative care. They've done their part, so don't get all in their grill about actually covering checkups and yearly tests and shit. And if you do need an eye operation, tough noogies. They did tell you not to eat all those corn dogs.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

What you've really got to wonder is—are those articles in because the majority of people do really need to be told (which would be a lot scarier)? An estimated 1.4 million cases of salmonellosis a year don't all happen by coincidence :-)

Anonymous said...

Dang. There go my summer plans.

I used to work at a pharmaceutical information publishing house. My job required me to read the patient information labels and inserts. I kid you not, one of them, included in a package of contraceptive jelly, read in big block letters, "NOT FOR ORAL ADMINISTRATION."