A Tad Bit of Foolishness (Be Amused): "I Hope Its Not Ebola"
There is a time and a place for the average member of the public to be made aware of global issues, and then there is ... NOT.
Anybody not living under a rock nowadays knows three things about Ebola:
1) It is a deadly disease currently ravaging parts of Africa;
2) There have now been less than a dozen cases of it reported in the United States; and
3) The 24-hour "PANIC, EVERYONE!" buzz about it on cable news is kind of crazy.
Disclaimer: We don't watch cable news anymore; last year we cut the cable/satellite chords, and have been happily living our lives immersed in our normal day-to-day drama; we still spend more time than we ought to in front of the television using the services of Amazon Prime and Hulu, which has literally saved us over a thousand dollars a year.
And life, despite the occasional bumps, is generally good to us....
UNTIL YESTERDAY.
(Bam, bam, BAM!!! Or other scary music you can hear in your head - insert your own special effects.)
Yesterday, I woke up with an upset stomach, low grade fever, and a headache. I worshiped the porcelain goddess twice (yeah, you try to find a politically correct way to say "threw up" without grossing yourself out), and ended up taking the day off work. By the end of the day, I was feeling much better, but my poor husband came home from work, and started his own version of "the misery."
But here is the foolish bit: there was a moment - a brief one, mind - where we looked at each other, and went, "I hope its not Ebola."
No, we haven't traveled to Africa or Texas or even New Jersey. We have had ZERO opportunities that we are aware of to be exposed to Ebola, but that actually went through our heads.
Are we idiots? Maybe. We knew *intellectually* that the odds of having EBOLA were in the slim-to-zero category, yet like the proverbial medical students learning about new diseases, it went through our heads.
If you haven't heard of it, "Medical Student Syndrome" is written up in wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_students%27_disease
Baars (2001) writes:
Suggestible states are very commonplace. Medical students who study frightening diseases for the first time routinely develop vivid delusions of having the "disease of the week"—whatever they are currently studying. This temporary kind of hypochondria is so common that it has acquired a name, “medical student syndrome.”
Hodges (2004), reviewing the literature, said that "the first descriptions of medical students' disease appeared in the 1960s." He may have been referring to the phrase, for the phenomenon itself was noted much earlier. George Lincoln Walton (1908) reported that
Medical instructors are continually consulted by students who fear that they have the diseases they are studying. The knowledge that pneumonia produces pain in a certain spot leads to a concentration of attention upon that region which causes any sensation there to give alarm. The mere knowledge of the location of the appendix transforms the most harmless sensations in that region into symptoms of serious menace.
(snip)
Hodges went on to describe work by Moss-Morris and Pétrie who saw medical students' disease as "a
normal perceptual process, rather than a form of hypochondriasis." Learning about a disease "
creates a mental schema or representation of the illness which includes the label of the illness and the symptoms associated with the condition. Once this representation is formed, symptoms or bodily sensations that the individual is currently experiencing which are consistent with the schema may be noticed, while inconsistent symptoms are ignored."
No, we didn't contract Ebola; the fact it even went through our heads says we've been contaminated with "the fear" and for that, we can only thank cable news.
They report on crime, and everyone runs to buy guns. They report on ISIS and people cower from their neighbors. They report on Ebola, and people examine their symptoms.
If we assume they aren't idiots, then "they" (or someone) has to be aware of this phenomenon. (Don't advertisers, and thus revenue, DEPEND on it?)
Fox News once won a lawsuit by arguing that it wasn't actually in the "News" business, but was in the "entertainment" business. It is Halloween; maybe that is why people who like to be scared watch them. Unfortunately, even refuting their hysteria causes more attention to be paid to the crisis du jour, and the whole blasted cycle keeps repeating itself.
I don't know how to fix this (other than not paying attention to them), but then I risk not being aware of actually IMPORTANT stuff.
As I said in my subject line, a bit of foolishness for thought. Fortunately, by this morning we both felt well enough to go to work, and frankly, we are both fine.
Its not Ebola.
But how many other people are going to have that same thought, thanks to the profitable fear mongering that takes place across the public airwaves?
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