While it is important to wear your seat belt and to not smoke cigarettes, the personal responsibility theory of health gets carried to extremes. This is most true with children. The implicit message we send pregnant women is that everyone can have a perfect baby but, if you screw-up once, your child could be born with birth defects or have problems later in childhood. The end result has been lots of litigation against obstetricians for unpreventable birth defects or injuries. The parents must prove it was the physician s fault to in order to believe that it was not their own fault.
Cancer engenders the same reaction.
Since some cancer is clearly preventable, it is assumed that most cancer must be preventable if we only knew what caused it. This is especially true for childhood cancers. While epidemiologists know that cancer is a major source of childhood mortality, most people do not think of cancer as a child s disease. This drives them to want to see it as caused by something, preferably something that can be changed so no more children will get cancer. The result is fear, and fear leads to litigation.