For a doctor to write that people “choose” addiction is an indication of the appallingly low levels of knowledge about addiction that people in medical fields not specifically involved in treating addiction can sometimes have. It’s the other side of the same coin that leads to doctor-shopping for opiates to be so easy to begin with.
For a doctor to start some well-needed judging of the people who aspire to nothing more than subsidized unemployment and recreational drug use is perfectly fine with me, but it must be paired with some more evidence-based-medicine thinking about how to deal with these problems. Telling people to choose not to be addicts is like telling them to choose not to be depressed or to choose not to have cancer: stupid, unscientific thinking that reflects an ideology about how we might want the world to be, that is even more unacceptable coming from an MD than from any random message board schlub.
Excuse me if I’m not convinced that this is literally how it happened.
We’re laughing now because it’s about white hicks. The second it’s about another race/location combo - inner city blacks, natives on reserve - you have to tiptoe around it. If the OP was about a black family in a ghetto this thread would be closed or in the Pit by now.
Not too many black people in Appalachia named “Jim Bob” - the stereotyping is sufficient that pretty much everyone steeped in US culture is going to guess “white” for the family’s race.
Nevertheless, a story about a family who lives in Appalachia, in which the children are named Jim Bob and Chastity, certainly contains a few clues, right? If you were picking some random family in an area that is overwhelmingly white and had to guess their race, which way would you bet?
If someone wished to be extremely charitable about the doctor’s motivation for writing and publishing this piece, it is an excellent rebuttal to Tea Party accusations that it is the big city elites and their minority minions leaching off the good small town and rural taxpayers that are causing so many problems for American healthcare.
The quote is literally nearly word for word what she said. The inaccuracy may be that it wasn’t the first thing she said, but after 30-60 seconds of other questions. But she did blatantly accuse me of just imagining myself in to problems despite having no evidence of it. (well - evidently the tests they ran showed up normal, they couldn’t find a problem - but I have no history whatsoever of seeking unnecesary medical treatment - I’m generally one of those people who have to be half-dead before bothering to see a doctor) It was pretty blatant and massively unprofessional.
And I’m not just biased against ER doctors or anything - I had to go again to the ER recently because of some sort of reaction that caused my throat to swell up. That doctor was nice, and very thorough, and as far as I can tell very good - I even went out of my way to tell the supervisor what a pleasant experience it was compared to last time.
Heck, he could be a black doctor treating white hicks or a white doctor treating black… whatever the urban equivalent of hicks is… and what difference would it make?
In his treatment? No difference, I suspect. But if a white doctor practicing in an overwhelmingly white area chooses to highlight a black family as an example of what is wrong with that society, his motives would be suspect, in my opinion.
Almost everyone in this thread is saying that while what the author describes is an actual problem, his little piece is so cartoonish as to be offensive, and actually reminiscent of a Chick tract. (I thank Heart of Dorkness for this description which is right on the mark.) I fail to see in which way we’re having fun laughing at those white hicks.
I didn’t laugh at it, but then my in-laws are like this. I sort of threw up inside a little bit.
Yes, it’s a bit cartoonish, but that can be used to make a point. The point being that these peoples problems aren’t a simple lack of money but cultural memes that work against them long term.
What do we do about it? Damifino. You got any ideas?
What do I think? The doctor is a bigot. He’s taken some specks of truth, based on experiences with the worst individual examples, and exaggerated and imagined them into a mercilessly damning stereotype of an entire class of people. And he says it their own stupid fault.
I was okay with it, until I realized the guy was apparently serious. If he would have just said it was a cartoonish overportrayal, then I could have enjoyed laughing at it.
If he actually thinks that way, then, yes, he is a judgmental prick.
I think if you’re going to portray people as utterly opposed to any sort of education, work, or religious life, you shouldn’t have them using words like “prodigal” and “sordid.” It seriously cuts into your “I live here, so I know all about these people” credibility. I don’t know that it makes this piece necessarily judgmental, but it does tell me that this is far more how the author imagines these people to be, rather than how they necessarily truly are.
Yes, there’s a lot of systemic dysfunction here in Appalachia. There’s a lot of systemic dysfunction pretty much everywhere, though; it just takes different forms in different places. Unless, of course, you think things like mortgaging/credit carding yourself to the eyeballs to live a lifestyle you can’t afford isn’t dysfunctional, self-destructive, or pretty goddamn epidemic in this country. In all honesty, I think we’re far more aware of the dysfunction in a subset of our population than most of the rest of the country.