Dr. Ronald W. Dworkin received his B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1981, his M.D. from the University of California at San Diego in 1985, and his Ph.D. in political philosophy from The Johns Hopkins University in 1995. His essays on religion, medical science, and healthcare have appeared in The Weekly Standard, Commentary, Public Interest, and Policy Review. In 2000, Dr. Dworkin joined the Hudson Institute as a Senior Fellow while continuing to work part-time as an anesthesiologist. He lives in Baltimore, MD
In this impassioned but hard-to-swallow treatise, Dworkin, an M.D. and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, laments the rise among primary care physicians of the "ideology" that "unhappiness [is] a disease" to be treated with "external cures" from psychotropic drugs to "obsessive" exercise. This view, he argues, has led doctors to push antidepressants onto patients at an explosive rate. Dworkin argues that primary care doctors initiated and conquered a turf war with psychiatrists in which antidepressants are their main source of power. The author shows how placebo science, the desire for happy patients and a desire for more personal doctoring led to a rise in dubiously beneficial alternative health practices. He belittles the 1980s buzzword "stress" with its accompanying surge of mind-body activities and denigrates the moral deficit he perceives to be underlying a widespread obsession with fitness culture. He also argues that "many Americans are only superficially religious, outwardly professing belief in God while crossing over to medicine for help when life grows really difficult." Dworkin's thesis is provocative but its sweeping claims, heavy reliance on the term "ideology" to describe doctors' motivations and his confrontational approach undermine the book's power to persuade. (June) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
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