Health meets fad

Anyone with access to the internet has now seen the ever growing trend known as the ice-bucket challenge. The challenge is simple, choose either to donate $100 dollars to an ALS charity or dump a bucket of ice water on your head and share a video of it to raise awareness.

I have seen a number of responses to this phenomenon, both positive and negative. A number of celebrities and frat-bros likely with slight attention-seeking motives, articles criticizing the fad aspect and rebuttals from ALS families. You know what I think of it all. It is all good it is all necessary. We need to be a culture that talks about health issues. We do need to try and understand what it is like, and unify over common causes of support and progress. There will be fads and viral videos no matter what. I would much rather see videos of people trying, if in an arguably odd way, to raise awareness for a very real and under-known about illness.

At the very least it gives name recognition to ALS. More than that, many people will see their friends, or favorite celebrities video and hopefully look up ALS, put a face and story on the issue, or donate towards the cause.

I do not see a negative. I say direct all the fads to raise awareness for real issues. Continue mass head-shavings for cancer, make people walk brace-legged for cerebral palsy, eat a tablespoon of salt for Addison's Disease. The action hardly matters, the point is to get the word out there, to humanize disease , sure raise some money and if people have some fun in the mean time, then good for them.