Click here for more debate from Times Online and the Battle for Ideas

Our health is a national pastime, with little to do with whether we are ill. Every fourth GP appointment is taken by someone who has nothing wrong with them. We want to be scanned, screened and palpated for early signs of disease. We want diagnoses of vague symptoms and special diets to follow. Our list of agents to avoid grows with every ‘cancer link’ story. And when we think we have failed, we have to purge, detoxify and self-medicate.

But why? I spend my working day pointing out the lack of evidence for many health claims. In fact, much health anxiety seems to be based on dubious medical assertions, overstated research findings or misleading ideas about our bodies and disease.

There’s an understandable inclination to blame health-related industries. After all, they encourage us to buy our loved ones a full body MOT for Christmas and generally exaggerate our risk of ills and need for pills. But are commercial messages really the top and bottom of it all? Surely, advertising and popular writing about health is responding to what we look for.

Perhaps it’s just that we should toughen up and stop seeking all this quasi-medical attention. We are told that the expectation of good health has made us neurotic. We’re now a nation obsessed with our bowels and bumpy bits, indulging in the guilty pleasure of a meat-feast pizza then seeking penance with the cholesterol kit. But it doesn't follow that a healthier population need be more obsessed with health.

A few weeks ago, a fellow commuter told me that he is “on tablets” because of “neighbour trouble” (disputes about parking). This was in the week that BBC Woman’s Hour discussed doubtful science in the medical treatment of naughty children and an article about nutrition for a good sex life landed on my desk. Having just emerged from a row about the pseudo-scientific ‘Brain Gym’ being used to improve the mental performance of primary school children, I couldn’t help but ask why we experience so many things as medical in the first place.

Health, it seems, is the currency in which we transact many parts of our lives. And that is not our fault. From the Prime Minister's screening pledges to local authority sponsored supplements for improving pupils’ performance, many agencies now minister in very specific ways to our health. Policies and budgets must be expressed in ‘health impacts’. Employers, schools, individuals – all are being asked about their “strategies” to improve health.

So it’s not surprising that people reach for the doctor, the online health check or the product to “boost your immune system”. We fear being negligent. We must keep our bodies working, like some delicate piece of apparatus that we have been left in control of and for which we might have to show due diligence should anything, ever, go wrong.

---

Join the Debate: Read John Naish on A nation of hypochondriacal bores

---

Tracey Brown is the Director of Sense about Science and a columnist for Science and Public Affairs