‘Dopesick’ and a Somewhat Bleak Winter Reading List
We have one month before summer is officially over, but at
least two months more of warm weather. Typically, in this part of New England,
Halloween is a warm day, often well into the 70s. In a good growing season –
which this wasn’t – we’re harvesting tomatoes in October. I know people love
autumn, but don’t wish away summer! Yes, the humidity this summer was killer,
but remember this: you don’t have to shovel humidity.
Look at these beautiful heirloom tomatoes we pulled from
our garden yesterday morning. I sauced them up with some of our garden basil
and parsley, and plenty of garlic. Last night’s dinner was simple bowls of
fresh pasta swimming in our homemade sauce. Summer is king.
Brad Blanton’s book ‘Radical Honesty’ is changing my life.
It’s going down as one of the most life changing books I’ve read. I’ve applied
Blanton’s principles to some of the most typically chancy areas of my life, and
the principles work. But I’ll give it to you straight: speaking your truth,
when it would just be so much easier
to withhold it, takes guts. It’s total out-of-the-comfort-zone, risk-taking behavior.
It’s hard, hard work.
There’s so much more to this book than just learning how
not to lie. It would take pages of writing if I were to try to compute it all.
Just get the book. Winter’s coming: you can bury yourself in it. I got my copy
from Thriftbooks for three dollars plus 99 cents shipping. A bargain.
There are several books on my winter reading list, all on
the same subject. The American epidemic of chronic disease, false diagnoses,
corruption in our so called ‘health-care system’, direct-to-consumer drug
advertising, the unyielding greed of health insurance conglomerates, and the
absolute mania of prescribing pharmaceuticals for everything from typical
childhood behaviors to curable-through-diet ‘diseases’ has been bothering my
mind for a long time.
Statistics that appall me include the 2014 report that more
than 16 percent of Americans are taking prescription medications to treat
psychosis. There just aren’t that many psychotics among us. More than 55
percent of Americans regularly take prescription medication, according to a
2017 survey. And most of these daily-use medications are prescribed by ordinary primary
care doctors after 10-minute office visits. Let that sink in for a moment.
I wonder how the landscape would change if health care
providers would get out of bed with Big Pharm and prescribe lifestyle approaches
and diet changes to people who come to them for an end their suffering.
On my winter 2018 reading list are Dopesick by Beth Macy; Catastrophic
Care by David Goldhill; and Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker. Wish I
could say I was going for some lighter reading through the long winter nights,
but this is a subject that is getting increasingly alarming to me. It’s also an
out-of-control monster of a health and ethics problem for all of us, but
especially for children, who are rarely if ever given a choice as to whether
they want to be given these dangerous drugs.
Americans are utterly doped up. It’s a rare person in
America over the age of 21 who hasn’t been diagnosed with a disorder and who
isn’t taking at least one pharmaceutical drug. We’ve become so casually used to
this that we barely blink at the 50-year-old taking four or five prescription
drugs daily. We have prescription drug ads selling to us on television and
online all day, every day. The ads are absurd and an insult to our
intelligence. They encourage us to take risks with our lives.
So, I’ll be curling up with some heavy reads this winter,
but it’s all good. When something gets under your skin and doesn’t go away,
when it gets into your head and won’t quiet down, you have to pay it heed. You must
scratch that itch, attend to that call. This subject has been rattling my cage
for years. I want to be one of those voices out there, loud and clear, that
says that we’ve had enough.
Barbie xo
