But, girl, you have no faith in medicine.
Acetaminophen. You see the medicine, oh girl.Well, strip the bark right off a tree and just hand it this way.
Don’t even need a drink of water to make the headache go away.Give me sugar pill and watch me just rattle down the street.
Acetaminophen. You see the medicine.Oh girl, you have no faith in medicine.
- The White Stripes, Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine
I’ve posted a new chapter in my Terminal Illness Primer for Caregivers series, entitled, Non-traditional Therapies and Clinical Trials. You can read it here.
Suppose I rode into town in a brightly painted caravan with the message, “Professor Annie’s Miracle Cure!” painted on the sides and pulled it into the town square, stepped out onto the grass and started expounding the virtues of my miraculous, simple and delicious cure for many of the health plagues of mankind: fatigue, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, auto-immune diseases, skin problems, stroke, cancer. Perhaps a small crowd would gather as I explained that it was really quite easy to do; there were only a few rules to follow. Maybe the crowd would grow in size as word spread of the amazing things that were being said in the town commons. Maybe some would ready their wallets intending to invest in this most amazing-sounding of curatives. There would be doubters, too, of course, looking for the “hook.” But there is no hook. There’s no little bottle filled with dubious liquid to sell. No tablets being peddled. No book to buy that promises to reveal all as soon as you hand over your hard-earned cash. The curative is readily available to nearly everyone: fruits, vegetables, whole grains and no added oils or fats. And the only price is the cost of the ingredients. But my guess is, that when I reveal to the crowd in the town square that all they have to do is change their eating habits – that the way to health and vitality is to convert to a plant-based, low-fat diet – most of the people would walk away.
I clipped out this picture from an issue of Wired (along with the accompanying, brief article) knowing that at some point I would figure out what I wanted to say about it. It has sat on my desk for a couple of weeks and every time I run across it I think: I must write something about this hideous photo. Now, my bailiwick is plant-based, cruelty-free recipes. It is my belief that eliminating meat and dairy from one’s diet guarantees a happier and healthier body. I mostly leave the animal rights activism to more knowledgeable and eloquent voices. So the other day when I read The Logic of Animal Rights, by activist and blogger Kara Kapelnikova, I knew that she had written what I would have liked to have said about the photo of this dairy cow hoisted into the air (by a “tilt table”) for an inspection of her hooves. The deceptive banality of it, the look in the cow’s eye as she stares at the photographer, the filth and muck that surrounds her…While there are certainly more graphic and disturbing images out there, this photo to me exemplifies how we exploit animals for our own needs – how many of us view animals (especially “food” animals) as products rather than living, feeling beings – born, bred and butchered so that we can dine on their remains. By the way, this was an article in a section called Toolkit about how to start a dairy farm.