if i only had an MD

Ah! This is what I've been saying! Today on Well, Tara Parker Pope posted about a new book called Live a Little! Breaking the Rules Won’t Break Your Health and the doctor who wrote it:

Dr. Love, a clinical professor of surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that failing to live by the various health rules is a major source of stress and guilt, particularly for women. For most of us, “pretty healthy” is healthy enough.

“Is the goal to live forever?” she said in a recent interview. “I would contend it’s not. It’s really to live as long as you can with the best quality of life you can. The problem was all of these women I kept meeting who were scared to death if they didn’t eat a cup of blueberries a day they would drop dead.”

The evil side of rules and regulations seems obvious to me but I guess people need real super duper statistical data stuff in order to believe it. Psh. Can't individual lives be data?

Tara succinctly summed up the book by saying "stop worrying about your health" (and even named the post New Health Rule: Quit Worrying About Your Health.) Which caused some head-scratching on my part. Because it's a book. About health. That will be read by people who care and thus sometimes worry about their health. That's like writing a manuscript called Why Books are Bogus and hoping for it to take off in the literary world.

But after reading the rest of what Dr. Love had to say in the post, I'm not entirely sure if that was the point she was trying to get across in her book. I could be entirely wrong here (I haven't read it and just ran into this post like 15 minutes ago,) but I feel like her point was more like: Hey women, don't slit your wrists just because you can't lose those last ten pounds. Be aware and conscious of your health and body, do what feels good to you, but don't set it to unreasonable standards. If you'll allow me another wild simile, it's like the difference between advocating that parents lock their children in their bedrooms to avoid the horrors of the swine flu and that it's alright to give 'em the shot, a glass of OJ, and a kiss on the forehead. i.e. Nobody's perfect, and you're not going to be, so get over it.

Which, to me, is different than saying "don't worry about your health." I feel like Tara took it to the extreme here, and again by calling it a rule in her title, even though I'm sure she was just going for irony and ha ha ha. But if I were Dr. Love, I'd probably be cringing right now.