Looking Ahead
In the past week, various media organizations have been swarming with two huge health discoveries. I subscribe to many of their newsletters and the e-blasts that landed in my inbox were as emphatic as if life had been discovered on another planet. The stories even edged out Barack Obama’s tour of Europe and the Middle East and dominated the home pages of a slew of national news Web sites. Their proclamations? “Soy lowers sperm count.” “Cell phones cause cancer.” One thought ran through my brain while I read both headlines: This is old news.
Understand that I am writing what you are reading now in the last week of July, and if you’re the first person to lay eyes on this, it is probably the last week of August, so you may think this article is old news and want to give me a lesson in hypocrisy. By the time you read this, the health discoveries I have mentioned will have sunk to the bottom of their respective Web pages, making their last stand near the site maps and privacy policies.
Now understand that we wrote about the soy-sperm-count link in November of 2007, which means we settled on the story idea sometime around June 2007, more than a year ago. We brought you the cell-phone-cancer connection in July of 2008, but we actually sat on this story idea for more than a year because all the information that was coming out at that time claimed cell phone use didn’t cause brain cancer. (Imagine us all patting ourselves on the back.) When we created the ideas for these two articles, the medical research wasn’t definitive as it is now. We spoke with experts who were studying these areas of interest and had some pretty powerful expert and educated guesses, but nonetheless, guesses that had yet to be validated in any qualified medical journal. We put these expert opinions on the pages of our magazine and in front of you, our readers, and waited for the rest of the media to catch up. They did and now we can sit back and say, *“We told you so.”
On one hand, we want to present you with accurate information, but on the other hand, we just can’t help ourselves from giving you a look at the future of medicine. This month’s issue is no different. For practical purposes, we’ll show you how to construct the healthiest medicine cabinet of your lives. Believe it or not, it’s more complicated than you’d think. For the prognosticators, we question how bright it is to cut meat completely out of your diet. The rest is yours to discover. |
