Spending Your Wellness Money on Candy
A few days ago, one of my more irascible friends dissed the ALS ice bucket challenge on Facebook, figuratively pouring cold water on event participants. He would have gotten a more favorable response had he announced to my wife’s book-club group (all of them mothers) that he didn’t think child-birth pain and labor was such a big deal.
His point was this, though — the ALS ice-bucket challenge (IBC) has raised disproportionate money/attention for an issue which pales (statistically) beside other diseases/health issues also in need of funding. For example, heart disease and cancer (each) annually cause 100X the deaths of ALS. Diabetes-related deaths are 10X higher. The numbers are more severe if we start talking about world-wide deaths from malnutrition or poor sanitation or lower respiratory disease. This info-graphic makes the point better than all of those words I just used.