The Tyranny of Health

There has recently been much in both lay and medical literature on promotion of healthy lifestyles. Once upon a time people did not have; they had lives. Those lives were filled with work and play, battle respite, excitement and boredom, but principally with the day-to-day for existence, centered largely around the family, birth, death, , and health. What is the difference between a lifestyle and a life? to it, I believe, is the concept that lifestyle is something one, and life is something that happens to one. This distinction will the future of medicine, and certainly health care reform, in this. The emphasis on healthy lifestyles, although salutary in many ways, a very dark side to it and has led to the increasing peril of a tyranny of in the United States. To explain the potential dangers of the emphasis healthy lifestyles, I here review the concept of health and its role in the of our society.