Re: 'The Compromised Plate: A call for real food over drugs' [Village News, Letter, 2/8/24]

Julie Reeder yet again proliferates her insightful research and knowledge to help guide us through our healthcare decisions. She is simply indefatigable. For a “local-yokel” newspaper, Village News is truly a treasure trove of information.

We all must take calculated risks, every day, as every decision entails a front and a back side to it. I'm afraid though some may have placed their bet on the wrong horse when it comes to their Covid vaccine and its boosters. There is now growing evidence of a rise in cancers resulting from the rush to get the Covid jab and booster shots. Only time will tell us what we will need to know. Until then, we must wait.

For a small percentage of our population though, the vaccine may have proven very wise to guard against an illness that had a fatality rate lower than 1%. As a Libertarian, though, I firmly believe folks have a right to educate themselves and then follow their gut, whatever it says. But with Big Pharma, educating customers on the front and back side of a medical decision is seldom their goal – profits are though.

Thus, it is unfathomable to me how so many folks still blindly trust the Pharmaceutical Industry with their healthcare decisions, without a scintilla of reflection beforehand or afterwards. You would think given all we went through in recent years with the mafia style tactics of passing the Covid vaccine mandates and then placing the vaccine onto our childhood vaccination schedules that we might just be a tad but leery of yet another drug that promises to “cure” all that ails us.

Yet, tons of folks are now procuring Ozempic (the weight loss drug) that Oprah has touted and that Weight Watchers now endorses. Weight Watchers used to serve as a powerful form of "accountability” towards making healthy lifestyle changes, but now has morphed into yet another pill pushing company that declares, "Your weight issue is a brain problem and nothing more.”

And above and beyond this, tons of Americans are hooked on SSRI's (antidepressant medicine) which a Harvard study in 2012 revealed only minimally differs for most patients from the placebo effect found in a sugar pill. Yet, Big Pharma rakes in billions of dollars every year as it unabashedly argues against this “placebo effect” claim.

Both SSRI's and Ozempic are likely to be taken for the rest of one’s lifetime – guaranteeing a limitless profit center for Big Pharma. And if Big Pharma seduces you to get your children hooked onto them, these drugs inevitably become a veritable gold rush of the highest order.

Yet, we could on the other hand simply accept an ancient truth like the Stoics did before us: life is tough, very tough. Medicating ourselves will not likely help us get through our challenges, our classrooms, nor develop our inner resilience, however enticing such medications may seem to be with all their hype and promises.

Today, the United States hardly offers a viable Healthcare System – we are more or less surrounded by a very profitable Sick-care sinkhole. If we wish to navigate around it, reading Julie Reeder’s commentaries and taking personal responsibility for our health is a great place to start; otherwise, we will awaken one day to discover we have been wearing a nose ring all along, and regrettably we all know where such cattle end up.

Rodney Smith