The cult of health is numbing the mind and damaging the body. It is not merely that people have come to live their lives in a constant struggle to delay death – through diet, exercise, medication, minimizing risk and avoiding danger.

Do you want to live forever? - No matter what the cost?

Can you prolong your life by health regime? Can you save yourself from yourself? While the health benefits of such activities are often exaggerated, the pursuit of health through life-style modification and attempts to prevent disease or detect it early, carriy risks that are often underestimated.

Would call yourself a robust individual? The worst of danger all is that the encouragement of professional intervention in personal life cuts down individual choices and encourages incapacity.

Do the various health and lifestyle advisors available today make you look good and feel good, or do they just make people who are neither very robust nor even individual?

Dr Michael Fitzpatrick examined the culture of health and prescribed a healthy dose of salt to be taken with all the ideas that you can significantly lengthen your life by lifestyle choice.

Can you take a barrage of BUPA-style tests, study the various print-outs of levels of this or that and work to improve your health? Not unless you are actually ill or at serious risk of a particular condition.

Mike mocked the idea behind such TV programmes as Change the Day You Die. The state of your health and when you die cannot be reduced to black and white in that way. Even a full-body MRI scan in glorious technecolour can only tell doctors so much about your body if you are not suffering from a real disease.

Many of these sorts of tests are marketed and work on the fears we all have of our mortality. We just have to accept that, one day, our bodies will get older and then suddenly start givng up. That's life.

Cholesterol testing is very common and is one of those tests that can be taken at home by people themselves, with various products on the market. But doctors can only tell so much from these tests and even they have problems with many false positives and negatives being given. The advice that follows health checks of this sort is often a purely moral and subjective judgement about how people live their lives.

Sanctimoniousness was once frowned on in the medical professions. Cholesterol worries are now so common that people want to be tested for this level in their 30s and 40s.

Mike pointed out that the official 'safe' level used to be 6.5. That figure was plucked from a line on a graph and then it was reduced to 5.2, putting three million people 'at risk' in the 'unsafe' zone of the graph overnight.

It is possible to reduce one's levels of cholesterol by 0.1 by going on an old-fashioned prison diet that may not be very good for you. The only other way is to take statins for the rest of your life, and the effects of these over very long periods are unclear.

Genetics largely determine what one's cholesterol levels, which have a loose connection with heart disease, actually are. Your lifestyle and diet far less so.

Most preventative tests will benefit only very few people. The Prostate Specific Allegen test nearly always ends in no action being being taken, regardless of the acutal results of the test. The test gives many false positives and the unpleasant and distressing biopsy of of the prostate still cannot predict outcomes by itself.

Many older men are found to have had prostate cancer when they die, which in a large majority of cases is a slowly developing disease. Forms of treament are usually ineffective even if the rapid form of disease is developing and surgery has a high chance of spoiling the quality of life for a patient through incontinence and impotence - without prolonging life.

Yet still the national screening process treats men who do not concern themselves with this disease as 'in denial'.

Even the screening for breast cancer is problematic and some experts in the filed feel that the money spent on screening women between the ages 50-65 would be better spent on treatment. Early detection rarely results in someone's life or quality of life being saved just in time.

Mike drew out the consequences of these ideas of health as being something more than 'not being ill', more than a sort of default setting people are assumed to be on, unless there is actually something wrong with them.

Health has mental, physical and social connotations now that are not about ill-health, but a fuzzy and undefined concept that true health can only be achieved with some great phyiscal effort. Health is regarded as your just reward for complying with the various fads in health advice.

Everybody is on a diet, everybody must judge what what is 'good' or 'bad' for them in a moral rather than a nutritional sense. In this way, the concept of health is expanded to become the meaning of existance. Existing itself becomes the point of existing, rather than what you do with your life.

Your body is not under your control - you will experience illness and death and there's very little you, or anybody else, can do about it. Dedicating your life to your health in this way can only result in a sort existential angst and narrows the your sense of what can be done with your life.

That kind of angst may even result in physical symtoms that make you feel ill! Preocupation with health is bad for you.

A morbidity about your own existance was challenged by Aristotle when he pointed out that a flourishing life is one that is lived, is not just about being, but doing. Acheivement is accomplished not in your body but out in the world. The truth of youself is out there, not in the narcissistic tomb of an MRI tunnel.

The concept of health can be expanded further and even more damagingly to include a concept of government-approved happiness that reduces the human potential to mere survival.

A t first, discussion mainly revolved around the various health concerns that people in the audience had in relation to food, organic food, food as a drug, additives in food, super foods and the five-a-day advice we all receive. Rob Clowes saw the attraction of knowing your body and the narcisstic pleasure of seeing internal pictures of it. Another participant said that the fact that we seem to be living longer and longer was giving us more time to become ill.

Jo Bell said the health concerns seemed to make one miserable whatever, even when you are healthy the concern you may get ill may make you ill!

Dan Travis pointed out that it seemed this was all leading to witholding treatment on the NHS on grounds of behaviour and Anna Travis saw moral control through health as a desirable thing for the authorities. Mr Travis had been lucky enough to have benefitted from a health test and had had cancer treated successfully.

Mike rubbished the five-a-day. If you eat just one orange a month, you don't get scurvy! The idea that there's all this crap in food is crap, said Mike - there's never been better food available to everyone in Britain ever before. The obsession with our bodies reflects a feeling of collective powerlessness in wider society. The health message boils down to dragging a miserable existance out a little bit longer.

For example, the best self-examination is rubbish, and only makes sense in a kind of psudo-religious Ten-Commandments way that relates to a new idea of the seven deadly sins.

At least religion has a positive agenda, Mike pointed out. The new health is anti-transendental!

Further points were made from the floor. Geoff Kidder remembered the 1970s fondly, when the hyperchondriac was rightly made fun of. He pointed out that health was now even encroaching on sport, and that the Olympics of 2012 were being redefined as a health event. Even in transport, people are being forced to cycle in some areas.

Dave Stoker saw both ends of the health concern spectrum in some of his fellow undergraduates. They compulsively clean their digs because they are worried about germs and then indulge in great feats of alcoholic consumption. Another young man said that surely health messages were important to the young if they risked liver-failiure.

Mike finished off with responses to these concerns. Student know drinking is bad for them. He told of one young man who gone to his doctor. The young man took 'special K' - ketamine - a dangerous substance that induces near-death experiences. He had gone to his GP to have his cholesterol level checked!

Drinking one or two bottles of whiskey a day for 20 years was not good for you, one patient had to be reminded by his GP, after he had come in to have health checks carried out.

Mike was very positive about health technology and its improvements in general, particularly ultrasound and the MRI scan - he just objected to their 'recreational' use.

The Olympics seemed to show that perhaps the British teams should cocentrate on the 'sitting-down' sports.

Mike finished by saying the only health advice he would reccommend is for smokers to give up. Otherwise the various problems in society that health concerns point up could only be solved by looking away from the body and at the wider society 'out there'.

The Brighton Salon would like to thank Bellerbys college for hosting this event and for providing tea and coffee. To learn more about Bellerby's College visit their website at www.bellerbys.com