Mad Scientists
In a recent trip to the library - man, I love the library - I decided I wanted to find something from the non-fiction section to keep me entertained and interested on the weekends. As you can tell from the food posts, I'm very interested in healthy living. So, this is the area where I went to choose my books. I picked up The Hundred-Year Lie: How Food and Medicine are Destroying Your Health by Randall Fitzgerald.
Overall, I recommend this book. It is thorough, informative, and backed by dozens and dozens of reputable works cited. It is alarmist, no question; however, that is exactly the point the author is trying to make. And he succeeds.
Neither Christopher nor I have ever been just-take-a-pill kind of people. We both have to convince the other when it's time to go to the doctor. We both have to read up on the research available on the internet for the medication we are prescribed. We both have a general mistrust of medication. It was nice to read this book and have factual information back up our intuition. We will use prescriptions when necessary. However, what we will not do is go get antibiotics for every cold we may get when they will do absolutely nothing for our cold and create an environment for developing stronger bugs.
The main thesis of the book is that mankind is performing a chemical experiment on itself while blindly expecting objective government agencies to be its watchdog. Fitzgerald talks about the food industry quite a bit, but also takes his sword of choice to the pharmaceutical and medical industries as well as the bias, political agencies charged with regulating these. My one critique is that he uses a lot of animal testing to show how medications should have been pulled from shelves long before they were, but he then argues that animal testing is not a valid form of comparison to human reactions to chemicals. Granted that is a simplification of his statement. For more information on that, just read the book! ;)
What I like best about the book is (1) it's an interesting read with a relatively well organized structure (2) it uses recognizable evidence for its claims (3) it makes sense. I also can agree that, generally speaking, doctors and the community at large are too focused on finding one single chemical cure for a disease or one single cause for a symptom. Fitzgerald successfully discussing the hazard of such an approach and the benefit of looking at synergistic properties of drugs, foods, and environmental toxins. I also appreciate his nod to holistic medicine and traditional use of food as illness prevention.
I finished the book in one week, reading solidly only about two days. So it does not take a long time to get through its pages. If you're interested in this kind of thing, I'd say it's a great one to pick up.
