My Doctor Prescribed Quotes

When prescribing one of the drugs I take, my doctor warned me of a common side effect: exaggerated, intensely vivid dreams. To be honest, I've never really noticed the difference. I've always dreamt big.

Tuesday, 9th Novermber 2004 Bleeped awake at 3AM from my first half hour shut-eye in three shifts to prescribe a sleeping pill to a patient whose sleep is evidently much more important than mine. My powers are greater than I realised; I arrive on the ward to find the patient is asleep.

The doctor came and prescribed opium for me. What a marvellous remedy for the pains of my experience!

This was my wake-up call. I opened my eyes to the depressing fact that there are other forces at work in medicine besides science. The U.S. health care system runs on a fee-for-service model in which doctors get paid for the pills and procedures they prescribe, rewarding quantity over quality. We don’t get reimbursed for time spent counseling our patients about the benefits of healthy eating. If doctors were instead paid for performance, there would be a financial incentive to treat the lifestyle causes of disease. Until the model of reimbursement changes, I don’t expect great changes in medical care or medical education.5

...sometimes they almost made me feel glad that I had a few extra years to play my depression out with therapy and other means, because I think its useful in youth- unless suicide or drug abuse are the alternatives- to have some faith in the mind to cure itself, to not rush to doctors or diagnosis's...I sometimes worry that part of what creates depression in young people is their own, and their parents, and the whole worlds impatience with allowing the phases of life to run their course. We will very likely soon be living in a society that confuses disease with normal life if the panic and rush to judgment and labeling do not slow down a bit. Somewhere between the unbelievable tardiness that the medical profession was guilty of in administering proper treatment to me and the eagerness to with which practitioners prescribe Ritalin for 8 year old boys and Paxil for 14 year old girls, there is a sane course of action.

In retrospect, that was the moment I realized my ignorance was going to exacerbate whatever the problem was, and that I had to prescribe myself some kind of medical education, at least as it pertained to my situation.

This year my doctor prescribed me antipsychotics. "To ... keep the psychotics away?" I asked, jokingly. She was not joking.

Well, look at the other characters in Winnie the Pooh. They all actually demonstrate that Pooh is the most mentally balanced. There’s Tigger, I mean, that tiger just can’t stay in the moment and enjoy it. He’s too much of a hedonist; he always wants the next adventure. That’s not healthy, he’ll burn out.” I started properly laughing. “And what about Eeyore?” “Well he’s a depressive, isn’t he? If Eeyore walked into my doctor’s office he’d be prescribed with a lifetime supply of antidepressants. And not just because US doctors dole them out like candy canes at Christmas.” The music stopped and I found myself clapping without even looking. “But Pooh?” “Pooh lives in the moment. He doesn’t fret about the past, or freak about the future. He’s an expert at mindfulness.” Kyle

My doctors, who are not cavalier with prescriptions, give me this medication because I have earned their trust. And yet, with mounting government and public pressure, my doctors’ hands are becoming increasingly tied. They apologetically explain to me why they are required to make the medication even harder for me to get, against their own medical judgment. If the day ever comes when they aren’t allowed to prescribe Percocet to me at all, it may well be the end of the minimal quality of life I fight so hard to achieve.

I love my mother. My mother loves my dad. Those two facts are undeniable. I want my father to live. I want him to fight to live as long as he can. My mother wants to let him pass. She does not want him suffering anymore. She says that I am not there in the middle of the night at home, when he begs her to let him die. I say that he should not be taking the medicine that the doctor is prescribing, that it made Mike Tyson want to eat his opponents young.

Bleeped awake at 3 a.m. from my first half-hour’s shuteye in three shifts to prescribe a sleeping pill for a patient, whose sleep is evidently much more important than mine. My powers are greater than I realized – I arrive on the ward to find the patient is asleep.

Luther did not believe that HIV was killing him. He believed that our inability to treat the symptoms that bothered him, our prescribing the wrong medications, was at the root of his problem. I almost believed him: Maybe if we could put together the right concoctions we could give him ten good years.

In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army.

Bleeped awake at 3 a.m. from my first half-hour's shut-eye in three shifts to prescribe a sleeping pill for a patient, whose sleep is evidently much more important than mine.

Bleeped awake at 3 a.m. from my first half-hour's shut-eye in three shifts to prescribe a sleeping pill for a patient, whose sleep is evidently much more important than mine. My powers are greater than I realized - I arrive on the ward to find the patient is asleep.

I encourage my patients to do what it takes to normalize their blood pressure so they do not require medication. Prescribing medications for high blood pressure has the effect of giving someone a permission slip. Medication has a minimal effect in reducing heart attack occurrence in patients with high blood pressure because it does not remove the underlying problem (atherosclerosis), it just treats the symptom. Patients given medication now falsely believe they are protected, and they continue to follow the same disease-causing lifestyle that led to the problem to begin with, until the inevitable occurs—their first heart attack or stroke. Maybe if high blood pressure medications had never been invented, doctors would have been forced to teach healthful living and nutritional disease causation to their patients. It is possible that many more lives could have been saved.

When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state.’ She seemed to the doctor decidedly more animated now, even as she seemed unable to meet his eyes. Her respiration had sped back up. The doctor recalled classic hyperventilatory episodes being characterized by carpopedal spasms, and reminded himself to monitor the patient’s hands and feet carefully during the interview for any signs of tetanic contraction, in which case the prescribed therapy would be I.V. calcium in a saline percentage he would need quickly to look up. ‘Well this’—she gestured at herself—‘isn’t a state. This is a feeling. I feel it all over. In my arms and legs.’ ‘That would include your carp—your hands and feet?’ ‘All over. My head, throat, butt. In my stomach. It’s all over everywhere. I don’t know what I could call it. It’s like I can’t get enough outside it to call it anything. It’s like horror more than sadness. It’s more like horror. It’s like something horrible is about to happen, the most horrible thing you can imagine—no, worse than you can imagine because there’s the feeling that there’s something you have to do right away to stop it but you don’t know what it is you have to do, and then it’s happening, too, the whole horrible time, it’s about to happen and also it’s happening, all at the same time.

If I am an American who has developed an Oxycontin addiction, as soon as my doctor realizes I’m an addict, she has to cut me off. She is allowed to prescribe to treat only my physical pain—not my addiction. Indeed, if she prescribes just to meet my addiction, she will face being stripped of her license and up to twenty-five years in jail84 as a common drug dealer—just

How to handle the stress of it all when you don’t even know that your life is stressful? Women saying “my nerves are shot” was the closest anyone came to examining the situation. What they didn’t discuss, though, they felt. That’s what substances were for. Every adult I knew was addicted to something—mostly cigarettes or booze. Also pills, both prescribed and gotten by other means. The women of my mom’s family, who had grown up in Wichita with doctors nearby during decades when health care was cheaper, were sold on the idea of prescriptions for symptoms rooted in psychological strife. Most of them were on “thyroid medicine” for exhaustion, “nerve pills” for anxiety.

Did you recently take a long flight?” I told her we’d flown from Oklahoma to Los Angeles, then from Los Angeles to Sydney. “Did you sleep a lot of that time?” she continued. “Pretty much the entire time,” I answered. My concern grew. Could it be something terrible and communicable? TB, perhaps? The flu? A terrible strain of airborne malaria? “What’s wrong, Doctor? Give it to me straight; I can take it.” “I believe what you have,” she said, “is an inner ear disturbance--most likely brought on by the long flight and the sleep.” An inner ear disturbance? How boring. How embarrassing. “What would sleeping a lot have to do with it?” I asked. As the daughter of a physician, I needed a little more data. She explained that since I hadn’t been awake much during the flight, I hadn’t yawned or naturally taken other steps to alleviate the ear popping that comes from a change in cabin pressure, and that my ears simply filled with fluid and were causing this current attack of vertigo. Fabulous, I thought. I’m a complete wimp. It was a real high point. “Is there anything she can do to make it better?” Marlboro Man asked, looking for a concrete solution. The doctor prescribed some decongestant and some antinausea medication, and I crawled out of her office in shame.

Shortly after I returned home from the Ukraine, I became severely ill with what doctors believed was a parasite. I couldn’t hold my food down and lost a lot of weight. Different doctors kept prescribing me antibiotics, but none of them seemed to help. For a couple of months, I was poked and tested in a variety of ways, only to have more questions surface than answers. Then I was sent to an ear, nose, and throat doctor for an evaluation. I was sitting in a waiting room with a bunch of toddlers, when my name was called. By the time I got into the examination room I knew I’d had enough. “Hey, I’m outta here,” I told the doctor. “I’ll take my chance with the resurrection.” Well, a couple of weeks later, my insurance agent called me. He was one of my lifelong friends and sounded concerned. “Hey, Jase,” he said. “Your insurance company wants you to see a psychiatrist.” Apparently, the ear, nose, and throat doctor recommended I undergo a full psychiatric evaluation based on my refusal to be examined, along with my speech on the resurrection! Apparently, he thought I was crazy. I convinced my buddy that I didn’t need a psychiatrist and eventually got over my illness. I would later read a passage of scripture in the Bible that caused me to smile in reflection on the entire ordeal. Second Corinthians 5:13 says: “If we are out of our mind, as some say, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you.

Some of my patients suffer greatly after a single course of antibiotics, even if the antibiotics were absolutely necessary. This is exactly what happened with Greg. He consulted me about symptoms that were not clear at all. Greg had frequent episodes of cold-like symptoms, which had been occurring regularly for over two years. The strange part was he never presented a fever or cough. He also suffered through bouts of depression, which affected him even though everything in his life was working well. When I asked Greg about his health history, he told me that he had had pneumonia two years earlier. Doctors—rightly—had prescribed a round of levaquin, a very strong antibiotic.

...[It] is my firm belief that all religions aim at making people better human beings and that, despite philosophical differences, some of them fundamental, they all aim at helping humanity to find happiness. This does not mean that I advocate any kind of world religion or 'super religion.' Rather I look on religion as medicine. For different complaints, doctors will prescribe different remedies. Therefore, because not everyone spiritual 'illness' is the same, different spiritual medicines are requires.

Dad was always there with all my doctors, and learning about all of my medicines that were prescribed.

I no longer take any of the prescriptions from my doctors. The bulk of the prescriptions made me sicker, not better. I had seen numerous doctors in the previous two decades for my progressive deterioration in health. None of them prescribed Hawaii! On reflection, none of them were competent in diagnosing the root cause of my deteriorating health and prescribing the correct treatment. My story with the medical profession is common.

Instead, we often use guanfacine, a nonstimulant that was originally developed to treat high blood pressure but has also been used to treat ADHD. Guanfacine targets specific circuits in the prefrontal cortex where adrenaline and noradrenaline exert their action, improving impulsiveness and concentration, even in situations of high stress. While I felt good about taking a more systemic approach, like the doctors who first began to suspect that a compromised immune system was behind HIV/AIDS, I was working on a medical frontier. There wasn’t (and still isn’t) a clear set of diagnostic criteria or a blood test for toxic stress, and there is no drug cocktail to prescribe. My biggest guide for what symptoms might be toxic stress–related was the ACE Study itself, but I knew that the number of diseases and conditions it accounted for might just be the tip of the iceberg. After all,

or the other,” she pleads to us and to Haena especially, since she thinks Haena is still married. “Who will take care of you when you are old? Look at me, what would my life be without you?” She doesn’t understand that I will never have the capacity to shoulder the responsibility of another life when I am scrambling like a madman in my own. It’s why I buy ten boxes of birth control pills at a time from the pharmacy. Miho told me once that in America, they don’t sell birth control over the counter and you need a doctor to prescribe it. And to see a doctor, you can’t just walk in—you have to schedule an appointment days or even weeks in advance. A lot of the things she tells me about America puzzle me because it is so different from how I imagine it to be. I suspect there might have been a lot of miscommunication while she was there. She probably didn’t understand much of what anyone said to her. I’ve heard her speak English before and it didn’t sound that fluent. Miho herself doesn’t use the pills because she says they affect her moods and her work too much. That and she’s afraid they’ll prevent her from being able to get pregnant in the future. I told her I hope that’s true—for

Nobody knows a woman as her milliner does. This is because, for a woman, buying a hat is an emotional thing. When she is in the full glory of youth and beauty, she buys a hat to cap the climax of her glamour. When she grows old, she buys a hat to turn back a little the relentless hands of time. When life slips out of the even way, a woman buys a hat. Sometimes in joy, sometimes in sorrow, but always for a purpose that is mixed up with her heart, and always she buys for her figure. Her figure cannot change from one moment to the next – but I have seen her face perform just this miracle. And when I see her eyes brighten and her chin lift as she turns her head, I feel very happy for my hat. Women have come to me for a hat to make their dreams come true. (Sometimes they do.) They have come to me in disappointment or grief, for a hat to take their minds off their troubles. (It very often works.) They have come for a hat to hold a husband. (This is more difficult, but not impossible.) They have come for a hat to catch a husband. (This is easy.) Being a milliner is sometimes like being a doctor. I prescribe a hat covered with pink roses to drive the blues away. I advise a daring hat for the woman who feels that she is in a rut, and wants to get out. For the girl who wants to get her man, I make a young, innocent, romantic hat, to make her look like a flower.

Here’s a classic case in point: Eva had been taking an antidepressant for two years but wanted to get off it because she was planning to get pregnant. Her doctor advised her not to stop taking the drug, which motivated her to see me. Eva explained that her saga had begun with PMS, featuring a week each month when she was irritable and prone to crying fits. Her doctor prescribed a birth control pill (a common treatment) and soon Eva was feeling even worse, with insomnia, fatigue, low libido, and a generally flat mood dogging her all month long. That’s when the doctor added the Wellbutrin to “pick her up,” as he said, and handle her presumed depression. From Eva’s perspective, she felt that the antidepressant helped her energy level, but it had limited benefits in terms of her mood and libido. And if she took it after midnight, her insomnia was exacerbated. She soon became accustomed to feeling stable but suboptimal, and she was convinced that the medication was keeping her afloat. The good news for Eva was that with careful preparation, she could leave medication behind—and restore her energy, her equilibrium, and her sense of control over her emotions. Step one consisted of some basic diet and exercise changes along with better stress response strategies. Step two involved stopping birth control pills and then testing her hormone levels. Just before her period, she had low cortisol and progesterone, which were likely the cause of the PMS that started her whole problem. Further testing revealed borderline low thyroid function, which may well have been the result of the contraceptives—and the cause of her increased depressive symptoms. When Eva was ready to begin tapering off her medication, she did so following my protocol. Even as her brain and body adjusted to not having the antidepressant surging through her system anymore, her energy levels improved, her sleep problems resolved, and her anxiety lifted. Within a year she was healthy, no longer taking any prescriptions, feeling good—and pregnant.

I'd been to see our family doctor for chronic stomach pains several times that semester. I didn't have an ulcer yet, so he prescribed Tums, stress reduction, and no more Diet Coke. My mother remarked that when she was a child, there was no such thing as stress. Back then, she said, it was just called life. It's good that the doctor gave us multiple options, because stress and Diet Coke were not leaving my routine any time soon.

My doctor has given me as strong an antihistamine as she is allowed to prescribe, but even that does nothing for the itching and swelling. The moment a grain of pollen enters the keep, I begin to tomato, and after two minutes of being exposed to the Ejaculateum Arboratoeaea, I am lying on the ground with my tongue lolling out of the side of my mouth. I am heartily glad that the trees and plants are still interested in copulatory activities; I only wish they would be so good as to keep their sperm away from my face. Do not pretend that pollen is anything else; it transfers haploid male genetic material and sullies the bedclothes unmercifully.

The ideal of free medical services collided against the reality of human behaviour, certainly in Singapore. My first lesson came from government clinics and hospitals. When doctors prescribed free antibiotics, patients took their tablet or capsules for two days, did not feel better, and threw away the balance. They then consulted private doctors, paid for their antibiotics, completed the course, and recovered.

A Polish man was suffering from constipation, so his doctor pre-scribed suppositories. A week later the Pole complained to the doctor that they didn’t produce the desired results. “Have you been taking them regularly?” the doctor asked. “What do you think I’ve been doing,” the Pole replied, “shoving them up my ass?!

I started to see a serious decline in health in high altitude professional astronomy. Most noticeable was the onset of constant fatigue, memory issues and confusion. The condition progressed during my time in the commercial and utility solar industry where I started falling asleep at work and developed hot skin. The doctors tested me and said I had shift work disorder in 2008 and vitamin D and Vitamin B12 deficiencies in 2011. In 2015 I had a COVID-19 like sickness that made everyone in the family really sick. I never recovered and this started regular visits to the doctors. They diagnosed severe sleep apnea and mental illness and prescribed a CPAP machine. Under the care of the doctors I became much sicker on their prescription drugs and treatments. I eventually got smart and figured out I was not going to recover under their care and they may actually kill me! In 2021, moving to Hawaii island revealed that I had ‘Altitude Hypersensitivity’ and a high altitude commuting disease called ‘Magee’s Disease’. By the end of 2023 I had developed the treatments for these conditions and made a reasonable recovery. There is no cure for either condition. They are life-long illnesses. I now have to live well below 1,000 feet near sea level and take the treatments for the rest of my life. I documented the conditions in the books ‘Toxic Altitude’ and ‘Magee’s Disease’. The treatments for the hypoxic high altitude damage appeared transferable into COVID-19 and Long COVID and these are documented in the books “COVID Supplements” and ‘Long COVID Supplements’.

She licks her lips and nods. “It could be. My doctor prescribed prednisone, which I’ve been able to do without until now. It’s a steroid that suppresses the immune

At the start of my residency, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed and all doctors had to get up to speed on the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), a new program under the Quality Payment Program (QPP), where a physician would now receive substantial adjustments to payments from Medicare if they met specific quality-of-care criteria. One would think that “quality” and “merit” in medicine would mean that the patient was actually getting better. But when I dug deep through the MIPS website to find the specific quality metrics for each specialty, I was shocked to see that these quality criteria were primarily based on whether doctors prescribed drugs regularly or did more interventions. Yes, a government incentive program focused less on actual patient outcomes (i.e., Did the patient get healthier?) and more on whether doctors prescribed long-term pharmaceuticals.

These communication messages created awareness-knowledge of the innovation among the medical community, but such scientific evaluations of the new drug were not sufficient to persuade the average doctor to adopt. Subjective evaluations of the new drug, based on the personal experiences of a doctor’s peers, were key to convincing the typical doctor to adopt gammanym for his own patients. When an office partner said to a colleague: “Look doctor, I prescribe gammanym for my patients, and it cures them more effectively than other antibiotics,” that kind of message often had an effect.

As you’ll read in Chapter 11, when colic was first described in the 1950s it was the hot new thing. And throughout the latter twentieth century whenever a baby cried, she was diagnosed with colic. It was a constellation of symptoms positioned as a diagnosis that had no clear treatment. For better or worse, colic was the label that kept pediatricians free and clear from fixing the problem. There was no fix. Fast-forward to the early twenty-first century. Reflux is the new colic. Unfortunately, some of my colleagues have fallen into the habit of labeling every inexplicably fussy baby with reflux. What’s worse, some act on the impulse and prescribe medications when they’re not indicated. Some of this is a function of a new label. Part of this may be a consequence of doctors seeing more and more babies in the same eight-hour clinic day. A label and the promise of a pill have a certain appeal when facing a desperate, tired mom in a six-minute follow-up visit. So proceed with caution if your doctor hears crying, sees a dirty burp cloth, and immediately wants to start medication. Remember that you are your baby’s lead advocate. Take the time to consider all that we’ve talked about over the past few pages before assuming medication is the only and best solution.

I Ask That I Do Not Die —but if I do I want an open coffin I am an American poet and therefore open for business Owls peck the windows of the 21st century as if looking for the board members of Exxon Mobil who who who who who Listen my beloved nothings your seriousness will kill you! But before you die my doctors have prescribed happiness God is a warm brick or a claw or the silence that survives empires An old woman in the rain with a pot of mushroom soup is one of God’s disguises. Her dog lifts its leg another one of God’s shenanigans and pushes its nose into morning’s ribcage I point my hand God this and God that and when God has nothing I still have my hairy hand for a pillow Put me in an open box so when God reaches inside my holes I can still see how a taxi makes a city more a city slippers on my feet, and only half covered by a sheet, in a yellow taxi so as not to seem laid out in state but in transit

This was my wake-up call. I opened my eyes to the depressing fact that there are other forces at work in medicine besides science. The U.S. health care system runs on a fee-for-service model in which doctors get paid for the pills and procedures they prescribe, rewarding quantity over quality.

I attended to their every desire, smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience, with the highest degree of devotion, so that over time their desires became mine, so that I came to anticipate wants not yet articulated, perhaps not even yet imagined, providing my siblings with the greatest possible succour, filling them up only so they could demand more, always more, demands to which I acceded with alacrity and discreet haste, ministering the complex curative draughts prescribed to them by various doctors, serving their meals and snacks, their cigarettes and aperitifs, their nightcaps and bedside glasses of milk.

But, in my opinion, the most horrifying part of Anna’s experience isn’t what happens to her physically, but how the people around her react: how her doctors dismiss and ignore her, expecting her to suffer through her pain for the good of her baby without any concern for whether her body can handle it; how her husband assumes she’s either making up or exaggerating her symptoms. I’m afraid I didn’t have to exaggerate these reactions at all. They’re all too real. The tendency to assume that women can’t be trusted to accurately convey their symptoms comes from the historical diagnosis of “hysteria,” which was once thought to be a medical condition said to only affect women. Doctors were taught that women were inherently liars, unreliable, or hysterical hypochondriacs. In some cases, they were even believed to be possessed. And these beliefs have persisted, even after the diagnosis of hysteria was proven to be nonsense. To this day doctors prescribe less pain medication to women than they do to men, they take longer to diagnose us with illness, and they’re more likely to send us home in the middle of a medical emergency like a heart attack. Unfortunately, all these prejudices disproportionately affect women of color. If you’re ever curious about why the maternal mortality rate in the United States is so high—particularly among Black women—these are good places to start. Doctors don’t understand our bodies, they don’t believe us about our symptoms, and they ignore us when we try to tell them we’re in pain.

But, in the end, even you are flat. I just never reached your edge before. I came right up to it, and always turned away. I didn't want to push you—ask you questions you couldn't answer. I hid your edge even from myself. You were too important to me—helping me think through my problems, laughing with me, keeping me company through so many long hours. That's the real trick. It's not how convincing you are. In fact, the questions were always there to ask. It would have been easy. Where are the graduate students you always talk about? What is this experiment you have been working on for years? But I never did it. And that's the point. I hid the edge from myself. That's how this works. That's how addictive this is—this need to feel like there is always someone there, unconditionally. Someone to talk to. Someone who understands. To not have to do the work myself to make myself understand. Instead, I just kept on with this self-deception, pretending I had someone when I did not. I know the doctors who prescribed you to me meant well. They thought they were helping me through a dark time. But in the end, you aren't anything but a prosthesis. You can't replace real support.

September 23 "Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) According to this advice from the good doctor, we are fine just the way we are. Whether we change dramatically or stay the same, we need not be aShamed of today’s thoughts, feelings and actions. Dr. Seuss tells us that while it may be prudent to hear out our critics, our self-image need not be swayed by their vantage points. Our best friends are not waiting for us to be better; they appreciate us completely—just the way we are. How long can we sustain belief in ourselves without becoming critical of ourselves? It will likely take practice. Somewhere along the line we became conditioned to never be satisfied. Where did that get us? Did we turn to pills, booze, bad relationships, Gambling, spending, eating and/or self-abuse? The doctor has prescribed a new medicine for the mind. Can we accept the remedy? Let’s look at ourselves through the eyes of those who consider us fine—right now, just like this. Why not start loving ourselves the way we are right now? When we hear the internal critic, how about showing that voice some compassion too? In being fair with myself I will avoid judging others. Bill W. said, “The way our ‘worthy’ alcoholics have sometimes tried to judge the ‘less worthy’ is, as we look back on it, rather comical. Imagine, if you can, one alcoholic judging another!” Now imagine needing the approval of another addict to feel worthy. We may hear in meetings, “Once I needed your approval and I would do anything to get it; today I appreciate your approval, but I am not willing to do anything to get it.” What situations challenge my ability to be authentic? How many minutes can I go without criticizing myself? Do I feel desperate for the approval of others?

Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of which they know nothing.

After working most of her life Grandma finally retired. At her next checkup, the new doctor told her to bring a list of all the medicines that had been prescribed for her. As the young doctor was looking through these, his eyes grew wide as he realized she had a prescription for birth control pills. "Mrs. Smith, do you realize these are BIRTH CONTROL pills?" “Yes, they help me sleep at night.” "Mrs. Smith, I assure you there is absolutely NOTHING in these that could possibly help you sleep! She reached out and patted the young Doctor’s knee. "Yes, dear, I know that. But every morning, I grind one up and mix it in the glass of orange juice that my 16 year old granddaughter drinks . . . and believe me, it helps me sleep at night.

Take a moment to think about that. Doctors routinely recommend a treatment for obesity (dieting) that is likely to result in their patients’ gaining more weight. After one of my talks, a doctor told me that it felt unethical not to recommend dieting to her obese patients, but when I asked her about the ethics of prescribing a treatment with such a high failure rate, she fell silent.

After one of my talks, a doctor told me that it felt unethical not to recommend dieting to her obese patients, but when I asked her about the ethics of prescribing a treatment with such a high failure rate, she fell silent.

The doctor prescribes, the apothecary follows his recommendations methodically. You deserve your sleep just as I deserve my Legion of Honor. I will write down the dosages on a scrap of paper and will affix it to the bottle, though you know perfectly well when quantity ceases to be mere quantity and takes on the qualities of a toxin. It is up to you to decide whether you should call on Doctor Canivet in his capacity as consulting doctor or proceed on your own. . . .” “On my own. On my own account, at my own risk.

Another aspect of my criticism: the image you get from reading the Roe v. Wade opinion is it’s mostly a doctor’s rights case—a doctor’s right to prescribe what he thinks his patient needs. And the images of the doctor and the little woman—it’s never the woman alone. It’s always the woman in consultation with her doctor. My idea of how choice should have developed was not a privacy notion, not a doctor’s right notion, but a woman’s right to control her own destiny, to be able to make choices without a Big Brother state telling her what she can and cannot do.

After a week or two or three under the fluorescent lights of my office, getting back to the cabin felt almost medically necessary, so much so that I often thought back to a time when doctors would prescribe “clear country air” to address the ailments of folks living in industrialized cities. I wondered how many people would still benefit from a prescription for cabin time instead of a bottle of pills.