Health and well-being are of major concern these days as fear psychosis grips our society. The tremendous shift driven by technological advances and over-dependence on diagnostic tools have caused significant changes in the practice of medicine. What used to be a mission driven by the Hippocratic Oath seems to be giving way to commercialisation. Health and well-being have become a big business and corporate hospitals have mushroomed all around. The fancy names and styles, however, seem to be doing precious little as hypochondriasis and neurasthenia seem to be spreading like an epidemic.
The cost of healthcare is rising. Fear of health and well-being is creating anxiety neuroses. There is widespread agony mongering all over driving people to corporate hospitals. But the much-needed succour is missing conspicuously. Interestingly, the major catastrophe facing humanity on the health front is bracketed under one phraseology — lifestyle diseases. leisure and technology have hardly come to mankind’s rescue. Or maybe they are the reasons for many problems.
In the age of information and social media, the one major casualty has been the gregarious man with the interactive societies that used to be the hallmark of earlier life becoming extinct. Man seems to have acquired power and wealth but at the same time appears to be losing vigour and health. Vulnerabilities are more due to weakening of physical and mental resilience rather than strength and increased resistivity of the microorganisms.
It is against this backdrop that we need to take a look at an interesting chance discovery of the nature of life in the past societies. It is the story of Roseto Valfortore reported by Malcolm Gladwell in his popular book Outliers. The word ‘outlier’ denotes a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from others of the sample. In other words, the odd man out. Roseto Valfortore lies in the Italian province of Foggia. What Gladwell calls The Roseto Mystery is his story about the Rosetans who migrated to America in search of livelihood. As their numbers increased, they created a Roseto in America. Perfectly normal. However, the intriguing aspect reported by the author is the observation of a medical doctor named Wolf, who to his dismay found that during the 1950s, there was hardly anybody from Roseto under the age of 65 dying of heart attack. Those days, cholesterol-lowering drugs and interventionist measures to prevent heart attacks were not even heard of.
Moreover, heart attacks were an epidemic in the United States. Wolf wanted to find out why Rosetans of America were free from the menace. He took help from his sociologist friend John Bruhn. The surprising finding was that there was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction and very little crime. The people were neither on welfare nor had they any other common diseases like peptic ulcers. The people were only dying of old age. Why this was true was intriguing.
On deeper analysis, the findings were startling. The secret of Roseto was not diet or exercise or genes or location. It was simply the Roseto way to life. The Rosetans visited one another, chatted when they met one another on the streets, and even cooked for one another in their backyards. It was the sociology that made the difference — the powerful, protective social culture that insulated Rosetans from the pressures of the modern world. A culture that fostered love and camaraderie rather than envy and apprehensions.
The writer is a professor of management and public speaker. He can be reached at ppathak.ism@gmail.com