Word in Edgeways

Appendix on the brain

Appendicitis always struck me as a dread illness from the day a kid in my second grade class vomited under his desk, ran off vomiting some more on the way, and ended up in hospital having his appendix yanked out. That was, for many years, my closest encounter with the complaint, until my son suffered a full-blown, no-holds-barred ruptured appendix several weeks ago, for which we tell him we still have to pay for the rental of the shop n' vac they had to get from Home Depot to clean him out.

Once he was out of surgery and on his way to a complete recovery, this fearful parent sat down for a breather, and in turn, the academic in me stood up and began asking some pointed questions, specifically in response to a comment I encountered again and again about how appendicitis is more common in industrialized countries than it is in, shall we say, developing countries. The reason? A more fiber-rich diet. It sounded fishy to me -- not because I didn't think it might be true -- but because I didn't see how anyone could be sure it was true. There's the reporting problem for one thing; how good is the data on appendicitis morbidity and mortality in places outside Europe and North America? And isn't the division of industrialized versus developing countries altogether too crude (you can bet that urban and upper class diets aren't like those of the villagers and the poor in places like South Asia and Africa). And what about all the other variables? From a few conversations with other anthropologists, we came up with this lot just for starters: total quantity of food eaten, frequency of meals and amount of food consumed at meals; parasite load; use of purges, enemas and digestives; surplus non-nutritional "crud" in meals, like stone from grinding spices on metates.

If the fiber theory is correct, then I can't help wondering why Kellogg's All Bran isn't pushing the case that if you eat their stuff, you lower your chance of getting appendicitis -- a far nastier and seemingly more immediate threat to health than some rather vague and far-off malady like colon cancer (although I admit that hemorrhoids and constipation are even more immediate problems afflicting the fiber-free....)

I am still trying to find out more about this mysterious research, and the researchers who do it. Sadly, as a cultural, and not a medical anthropologist, it's not something I can look into directly, although it's at times like this I wonder whether I should have stuck with the physical anthro camp, and not beat a path over to the dark side...

posted by Sylvie @ 12:11 AM