The Danger of Treating Symptoms Instead of the Cause
Americans are fascinated with Super Bowl ads. Tremendous amounts of capital and energy are devoted to capturing attention during the big game. We reply by discussing and sharing our favorites on social media, willingly opening our minds and, often, wallets.
This year’s most discussed ad reflected the entire marketing process: constipation. Bloated corporate budgets could not have been more perfectly symbolized. Yet this target audience was specifically the opioid-induced, adding another layer of cringe to the projected $500 million market of irregular pill poppers.
Daniel Lieberman, a Harvard paleoanthropologist, calls most lower back pain, a common reason for opioid prescriptions, a mismatch disease—a bodily or psychic ailment caused by cultural evolution, which he argues is now often more influential than biological evolution. As it goes, one mismatch (back pain) leads to another (constipation). Given that our social norms are at odds with genetic history, a plethora of problems is created. He writes,
It is possible that we are sometimes so effective at treating a mismatch disease’s symptoms that we reduce the urgency of treating its causes.
