Are we a nation so fearful of being less than perfect that we need to be repaired, and if so, at what cost?
- Ceicei
Ceicei, that might be part of it, but I think there's something more going on. I see two main factors at work behind this `something more':
(i) fear of new and terrifying ailments that can remain latent for years and years, which have begun to emerge as far more menacing threats to our health than the old, pretty in-your-face infectious diseases, the former major killers like typhus, cholera, diptheria, rheumatic fever—stuff that was killing our great-grandparents and even, in some quarters, our grandparents, but was stopped cold by the discovery of antibiotics. This is stuff that we don't have `magic bullets' for and therefore increasingly keep many of us awake at night, afraid. I'm thinking now of stuff like variant Creuzfelt-Jakob syndrome, the human analogue of `mad cow' disease, which is showing a steady and ominous increase in frequency in the western world, or ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease, once extremely rare, but again, showing up more and more—both of these being virtual death sentences; Alzheimer's is another one. And there are many other neural and neuromuscular illness that we get `too much' information about—stuff that seems to be waiting up the line, if we live long enough. And more and more of us are doing that. We don't know if Alzheimer's disease is actually reaching epidemic status, as some people think; what's happening is that more and more people are living to an age where the triggering factors for Alzheimer's are satisfied. So our picture of illness is, I think, subtely but crucially changing: once upon a time, say up to about half a century ago, it was like lightning striking you; these days, it's more like a very long, creepy dark alley, filled with psychopaths, that we can't avoided walking through. People are much more anxious about their health, and need much more ongoing reassurance, because of this change in the nature of the illness (ignore the fact that cancer and heart disease, the big killers, are heavily implicated in lifestyle choices; things related to lifestyle are less likely to worry people, for some reason).
(ii) huge publicity placed on esoteric cutting-edge technological medicine, like in vivo gene therapy, or microimplantation of radioactive slivers which, like shaped charges, are able to deliver the bulk of their lethal radiation to malignant cells, sparing the healthy ones. With all these new fancy diagnostic tools and microtechnological aids, it seems that we have an almost limitless range of means available to defeat our ailments. People have that kind of picture, and they also have heard over and over again about `early diagnosis'—very true, no question; if everyone started getting colonoscopies at regular long-term intervals from age 40 on, colorectal cancers could probably be virtually eliminated. But given (i) above, people want more than this; they believe that if they're scanned at an essentially microscopic scale and bad cells/bad proteins/bad anythings are found, some obscure advanced technological fix will be there to save them and they can get on with the business of living forever.
(i) and (ii) are both products of a tremendous and accelerating progress not just in medicine but in science generally, one that has many potential health spinoffs. But the brutal fact is that if people in the western world stopped smoking, got a lot more exercise, and ate a bit more sensibly, it would prolong the average lifespan way, way more than breakthroughs on the frontiers of nanotherapy. But our cultural model seems to be, wait till something's broken (or till you discover it's broken) and then fix or replace it, rather than looking after it so it doesn't break in the first place...
). If your medical professionals can't help you and are constantly telling you X when you think it is Y, after a while you begin to doubt yourself and get sucked into the vicious cycle of always thinking or acting like you are sick even when you are not. 
