Neither Body nor Brain: Comparing Preventive Attitudes to Prostate Cancer and Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract

This article compares health promotion attitudes towards prostate cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Our aim is to demonstrate that these two apparently distinct conditions of the aging body – one affecting the male reproductive system, the other primarily the brain – are addressed in similar fashion in recent public health activities because of a growing emphasis on a ‘cardiovascular logic’. We suggest that this is a form of reductionism, and argue that it leaves us with a dangerous paradox: while re-transcending, at least partially, the conceptual separation of body and brain, it clouds much-needed discussion and research, such as contingent issues of socio-economic and socio-cultural disease disparities.