Here’s what your body would say if it could talk
James Hamblin was a radiologist at the University of California Los Angeles Medical Center, but he found the job isolating, exhausting and ultimately unfulfilling. So he studied improv comedy at night, and became a health editor at the Atlantic in 2012. He mixes humor and anecdotes with serious science journalism in a Web series called “If Our Bodies Could Talk,” a kind of antidote to Dr. Oz. That series has now become a book of the same name, in which Hamblin begins with questions like: Can I “boost” my immune system? Why is there Vitaminwater? — and uses them to tell a complicated story about health and the ways we can improve our understanding of it.
I recently spoke with him about the book. What follows has been edited for length and clarity.
You make a lot of jokes throughout the book. How is humor important to our health?
For one, it can help to highlight hypocrisy and inconsistencies in a way that other modes of communication don’t. It’s also just good for you, which you can see in this story I tell about a woman, Beth Usher, who is a certified humor professional. As a doctor you might scoff at that title, you know, like it’s New Age trivial stuff. But it’s not. Beth had to have half of her brain removed, ultimately by Ben Carson, to fix an extremely rare condition called Rasmussen’s encephalitis that was causing her to have hundreds of seizures every day at the age of 5. He grabbed a bunch of headlines and fame for Beth’s surgery, and it was miraculous, but afterward she was left by medical sci- ence to live life with half a brain. That’s it. That was medical science’s solution. The idea of making life livable afterward, and making her happy, that came through her connections in the world of professional humor. And now she speaks and works with people to help them find humor in their lives. If you look back at her story and what made the biggest relative differences — medicine was able to keep her from not dying. That’s obviously huge. But in terms of making life good, that was the certified humor professional program.
Why is it important to drink Vitaminwater?
I say this many times in the book, that if you aren’t getting at least 10 doses of Vitaminwater a day, you need to worry.
But seriously, I think one of the most interesting arguments you make is that the knowledge necessary for answering what might look like silly questions is actually important to personal health. Is the idea that ignorance contributes to problems, like people drinking sugar water disguised as something healthy?
Yes, that’s it. We do need vitamins, but if you eat a marginally balanced diet, even in our modern food system, you will get your vitamins. The word really refers to an array of chemicals that have no related structure or function. The first one that was discovered was thiamine. It was found to be vital to existence, in that if you were deficient you got diseases. (The word vitamin comes from “vital amine.”) Soon it became evident that there were other compounds that people needed, which upended popular germ theory at the time, the idea that disease was caused by the presence of something. Now there were diseases — scurvy, beriberi, rickets — that were caused by the absence of something. It was almost like magic that you could cure someone with scurvy, bleeding to death out of every orifice, just by giving them an orange. So at the time it made sense that taking more of these life-giving compounds, these vital amines, would be better for you. We know that’s not true, but marketers still use that angle.
Another theme of your b o o k i s mi s a l l o c a t e d resources, financial and mental. We make bad decisions with our money and time.
Absolutely. Medicine is a place that is classically bad at allocating resources in a way that is efficient for improving health. We often focus on fancy-seeming lifesaving therapies, but don’t think enough about how to take limited resources and give quality life years to as many people as possible. As a doctor, I know that we don’t tend to think about our career in terms of maximizing the amount of health in the world. We tend to think about things on a case-by-case basis, and traditional sense is far from we’re moved by stories of trivial, but on a large scale individuals that make miracmost of what determines our ulous recoveries, or pioneers health and longevity is day-toof high-tech advancements, day decisions we make, the which get all the awards and environment we live in, how all the press. But with regards much stress we are under, to human capital and financial how much sleep we get. And investment in these advancethese are all factors that may ments, they may not be as seem like less sophisticated good as simply adding bike problems than what might be lanes or making sure that peosolved with brain surgery, but ple have access to a high-qualare at once more complex, ity food system and safe places and solving them we stand to sleep at night. to gain much more.
You highlight how we fall This is hard to do — to in love with the extremely think about individual expensive robot that perhealth, and specific interforms surgery, or the talventions, but also to think ented surgeon, but we about ourselves as part of don’t romanticize the peoa community. ple who are in the trenches Anecdotes are powerful. every day, making sure We like to hear individual that you get exercise, eat stories, stories about mirachealthfully, don’t become ulous recoveries, not piles of obsessed with impossible impersonal statistics. That’s beauty standards. what we’re moved by, the
There’s something about story of one kid who had professional medical knowlan adverse reaction, and we edge that is like a badge of don’t want our kid to be that honor. When I was in medikid. So I try to acknowledge cal school I was proud, and that in the book, but also I don’t think at that age I build stories of individuals would have been as proud into a broader narrative of to be helping get bike lanes what health is and how to put into cities. think about it.
Which, in a way, brings It reminds me of another us back to Ben Carson, image from the book, of who is in charge of the people walking in a park, Department of Housing that’s labeled “immune and Urban Development. system.” That’s in the secYou t a l k a b out t hat i n tion where you answer the depth, the idea that where question “Can I boost my you live affects health in immune system?” How do profound ways. Changing you get from people wona neighborhood is like a dering if they can prevent medical intervention that catching colds by taking might affect far more lives vitamin C to that image? than a flashy new surgical I’m very interested in the technique, right? idea of the immune system.
We have an image in the It was the first bodily sysprologue of the book based t e m, t o my u n d e r s t a n d - on a pyramid developed by ing, that didn’t correspond the Centers for Disease Conto a specific set of physitrol and Prevention. At the cal organs. Instead, it was very top of the pyramid are a diffuse net work of cells clinical interventions, but the throughout our body, and base is socioeconomic conincludes the skin, which acts ditions and surroundings. as a barrier to microbes. The health care system in the We initially thought of it as what defended “self ” from “other,” but now we understand that the system is interacting with the “other.” We know this about our microbiome now, too, that it interacts with the environment, and we can’t think of ourselves as separate individuals walking around defending ourselves from the bad things outside of us.
That’s amazing, the idea that our immune system is somehow collective.
Yes, I love the idea that your immune system is also made up of the people you just interac ted with, and whatever you’ve gotten on your hands, and these factors are shaping our biome, which in turn shapes our immune system. It’s all connected, it’s all a big web.
It’s so hard to wrap my mind around, because I’m so invested in the idea of myself as a self-contained, autonomous thing, that protects itself. And that gets in the way of believing that investing in the health of my community is, actually, investing in my own health.
It’s a very liberal understanding of the body. Would you want to live at the end of a cul-de-sac, and fortify it with a huge wall, and watch as the world around you sinks into poverty and crime? What, will you just never leave your compound? Hire armed guards? What does your existence become? People think they want everything for themselves, but they really don’t, and they won’t thrive that way. And that’s how the body works. That’s how health works, too.