Achieving wellness, whatever that is

Both muster science, statistics and a smattering of personal experience to present, with no small fanfare, completely, utterly, diametrically opposite advice.

Dr Snyderman, a surgeon and longtime broadcast journalist who is the chief medical editor of NBC News, delivers no surprises. Her mission is to assure readers that enough attention to the principles of modern medical science will bring you a longer, healthier life.

With chirpy, can-do optimism she recapitulates the standard wisdom in her Medical myths that can kill you and the 101 truths that will save, extend and improve your life.

Watch your diet, exercise, lose weight, stop smoking, be screened regularly for a variety of dire illnesses, rein in cholesterol and blood sugar, stay in touch with your doctor and be sure to check out those aches and pains pronto, just in case. So speaks the medical establishment.

Everyone, perhaps, but Dr Hadler, a rheumatologist and professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina who is a longtime debunker of much the establishment holds dear. Hadler may not actually keep a skull on his desk, but he might as well. We are all going to die, he reminds us. Holding every dire illness at bay forever is simply not an option, he expounds in A prescription for health in an overtreated America8221;.

The real goal is to reach a venerable age 8212; say 85 8212; more or less intact. And the statistics tell Hadler that ignoring most of the advice Snyderman offers is the way to do it. The statistics are the key here, and readers will need stamina to traverse the thicket of numbers and analyses he provides.

Reviewing the data behind many of the widely endorsed medical truths of our day, he concludes that most come up too short on benefit and too high on risk to justify widespread credence.

Hadler sees no evidence that mild high blood pressure or mildly elevated blood sugar pose much of a risk to longevity 8212; certainly not enough to warrant the aggressive drug treatment often offered for them. The same goes for the extra 20 pounds that make you overweight but not obese, and the modest rise in serum cholesterol that, these days, spell a statin for life for many healthy people.

He deplores the careful attention we pay to the state of our coronary arteries. Angioplasties, stents, coronary artery bypass grafts. All these procedures, he feels, 8220;should be consigned to the annals of good ideas that proved bad8221;. As for the screening that purportedly keeps us safe from cancer, mammography and the blood test for prostate cancer are, in his view, cudgels that can harm as much as help. Nor does he want any part of routine colonoscopies: 8220;Let my polyps go.8221;

Yet, both books do raise serious questions. Hadler articulates one: What exactly does it mean to be well? Is it complete freedom from pain, creaky joints, dyspepsia and sleepless nights? Or is it instead, as he suggests, the ability to cope with all these common physical problems without transforming oneself from person to patient?

What are the cumulative psychic and economic tolls on a person, and on a nation of conflating discomfort and disease?

Hold on, Snyderman might counter. If even one life is saved by the standard medical rigmarole 8212;and that life could be yours 8212; is it not all worthwhile in the end?

You, reader, have undoubtedly already decided which author is a sage and which one a lunatic, which advice is sound, and which is simply misguided. And that is the final thought-provoking lesson. Our health beliefs are so deeply ingrained that data, admonitions, guidelines and oceans of ink on reams of paper will seldom dissuade us from believing what we want to be true.