Is civilization dangerous to our health? There is a good chance. In any event, people have pursued salubrity throughout history. In fact, no fad has been untested, no tonic untasted, no muscle unflexed. The health seeker is easy to recognize in both ancient, modern, and most ardent manifestations…
In the annals of the human comedy few activities can rival in richness, variety and eccentricity the ardent and often passionate pursuit of good health by the more or less healthy. The quest of the truly ill for succor is, of course, another matter. It is a quest undertaken by every sort and class of person, for every conceivable reason; a pursuit that has employed a bewildering variety of means and drawn upon an equally bewildering variety of doctrines. It has left the world permanent monuments in the spas of nineteenth-century Europe. It has even been the foundation of at least one great American fortune.
— “The canon of reputability” must adapt itself to the economic circumstances and the traditions of each particular class, but it permeates all society to greater or less degrees. Though originating among the leisure class, it characterizes the total culture and shapes its characteristic life-style. This is why even the poor, though they are physically better off in modern society than their forebears were in their time, suffer more. “The existing system has not made. . . the industrious poor poorer as measured absolutely but it does tend to make them relatively poorer, in their own eyes . . . and . . . that is what seems to count.” Clearly, Veblen, like others before and after him, had in effect come upon the idea of “relative deprivation.”
In Veblen’s opinion the simplistic notions of human motivation on which classical economics rest cannot serve to explain the springs of action of man in modern pecuniary civilization. It is not the propensity to save or to truck and barter that animates man in the modern world, but the propensity to excel his neighbor. —http://www.bolender.com/Sociological%20Theory/Veblen,%20Thorstein/veblen,_thorstein.htm. click image for source…
The pursuit of health flourishes today as it flourished in Augustan Rome. Indeed, it is as old as civilization, for it was civilization itself that triggered it: when society became civilized enough to provide a number of people with a comfortably unhealthy existence, the true health seeker appeared. They have been around ever since, that is, about three and a half millenniums.
—A true fitness trailblazer, Drake was the first woman to star in her own daily exercise show. The Debbie Drake Show debuted in 1960 and aired during the morning on dozens of stations across the country.
Related Video:
“Your hostess on this trip to beauty is Debbie Drake”: Watch a full 12-minute episode of The Debbie Drake Show.
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Between that show and its follow-up, Debbie Drake’s Dancercize, she stayed on the air continuously until 1978. Like Jack LaLanne,…click image for source…
They are the people who scrutinize the common life, judge it insalubrious, and decide to re-organize their own life on a more rationally healthful basis. The health seeker may decide that common foods bar their way to glowing fitness, that the customary diet clogs the body. They may decide that their is something radically unhealthy about the way most people sleep, or bathe, or play, or even dress; after all, the crusade against the Victorian corset was launched by good-health promoters.
—When you place a long, hollow cone coated in beeswax or paraffin into your ear and let it burn, a subtle vacuum effect is created in the ear canal. This vacuuming effect reportedly draws ear wax out of the ear and thus cures a wide range of medical problems, such as ear aches, sinus infections, headaches and even vertigo — at least that’s what proponents of ear candling claim. Of course, there is absolutely no medical support for these claims, and instead, serious reports of burns and even punctured ear drums have surfaced.
Read more: http://ca.askmen.com/top_10/fitness/top-10-bizarre-health-fads_7.html#ixzz2RNZIemVd—
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