He's working on a new cocktail

I was writing the other day about framing some of the ethical conflicts in my book as environmental issues. As I am starting to see it, our right to be physically healthy is being compromised by big pharma in several areas: the side effects of all the drugs we are now taking, as well as the persistence of those drugs in our environment, which exposes all of us, whether we like it or not.

The omnipresence of these substances also introduces another element of uncertainty: how the prescription drugs so many of us are taking (3.7 billion prescriptions in the US are written a year, an increase of 12 percent over five years ago, according to The Guardian) are interacting with what we are getting in our water supply. Surely this "cocktail" of exposure affects some of us more than others (in terms of overall physical health and the health of our offspring, even, I would guess, of the potential for introducing spontaneous mutations). It could still prove that something like this even explains autism and other pervasive developmental disorders. Perhaps a shot of a vaccine is just one of the straws that causes the body to throw some kind of overload switch in certain sensitive individuals (e.g., babies and children) who have already been exposed to complex chemicals with long half-lives in their drinking water and breast milk.

Yet it's clear that it's not just big pharma that can act as a sort of public health riptide. We also must consider the role of food in questions of overall health. Learning about the effects of gluten is teaching me a lot about the gut's complex role in the body. I see a distinct possibility that more of us than we know, by far, are sensitive or even allergic to some of the foods we take for granted (wheat, dairy, eggs are common allergens). It seems more likely that our guts are affecting our brains, rather than our gut diseases being "all in our heads." If we can change our thinking, doctors have argued for years, then our guts will heal. But what if our injured guts won't let us think straight? Then we have to heal them before we can heal what's in our heads. It's hard to remember that not all food is love, isn't it? We all want to believe that about what we eat every day. Most of our mamas told us so.

Yet I feel we have to start drawing our line in the sand, defining the limits of what kind of side effects and increases in expenditures on drugs and medicine and insurance costs we are willing to tolerate, what kinds of concentrations of chemicals we will tolerate in our environment, and we must continue defining those boundaries repeatedly and over time given new knowledge and data, before our rights to do so are preempted by the rights claimed by corporate America to profit at any cost.