Frank Furedi's Our Unhealthy Obsession With Sickness

In Frank Furedi’s reading, “Our Unhealthy Obsession with Sickness”, he concludes that the health care crisis which we are going through will not change nor get better. To some extent I agree with Mr. Furedi’s writing. He discusses how in recent times, people in society are normalizing having an illness and are willingly open to talking about them (471). Furedi also mentioned how people now embrace having an illness, rather than noticing their worth before they were sick. I too have noticed that it is becoming increasingly acceptable to the extent that people want something to be wrong with them, which I find extremely odd.
The paradox in this writing is mainly in the conclusion. From the reader’s perspective, we have the same suspicion that most of our openness and normalizing sickness is the issues mainly in this cultural sphere. When he talks about social class in paragraph 10, he explains how mainly middle class people take their time reading food labels while grocery shopping. I think that is another conspiracy that might be very true. This is something I have observed myself while studying different social classes. However, when the author began to discuss politics and healthcare, I disagreed with some of Furedi’s

In the reading, the term “friend” is used in several different contexts. He talks about the fact that he knows less information about his friends in real life, than his online friends. For example, in the third paragraph he writes “It’s weird that I know more about you than I do about actual friends I hang out with in person--” (182). The general meaning of the word friend now has a different meaning. It used to be people that you knew and with who you were familiar and built a connection with were considered your friend. Now, people can be considered your friend just by adding you on a social network. This brings about confusion when trying to describe what a true friend really