Healthcare: A Lucrative Business or a Definable Right?

In healthcare, as in hunger and housing, we face a moral choice. Is Mammon or caritas – profit or wellbeing – the best driver of community health initiatives? In his… Read More

Do We Fully Understand and Account for Addiction in Vermont?

Last year, well over 100 Vermonters died of street and pharmaceutical drug overdoses. Like traffic deaths, we keep track and publicize annually our drug deaths both as an indicator of… Read More

Why is Pharma Obsessed with my Cucumber?

A recent audit report by State Auditor Doug Hoffer lays bare the staggering cost of healthcare to Vermonters – $9,000 per year, almost $2,000 more than the national average. For… Read More

Healthcare and the Role of Vermont Hospitals

As a grateful user of Vermont’s healthcare system (UVM hip replacement last year), an observer of its growth (the house I grew up in in Morrisville was next to a… Read More

The True Cost of Adverse Childhood Experiences

Do you know what an A.C.E. is? It’s not your local hardware store, the winning card in your hand, nor your friend who plays professional tennis. It’s an increasing used… Read More

Don’t medicate grief

Recently, the leader of a major eastern university observed that twenty-five per cent of his incoming class this year is on some form of prescribed psychotropic medication for ADHD, depression,… Read More

Mental Health is Not a Black Hole

NASA defines a black hole as… “a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light cannot get out. The gravity is so strong because matter has been… Read More

The Future of Vermont Health Care

Vermont has committed to meeting the standards imposed by the new federal healthcare law and also to pioneer a single-payer system by 2017. And while few would debate the need… Read More

Heroin in Vermont

The danger in believing we are special is that it can blind us to what’s right under our noses. We mix and drink our Kool-Aid and then bask in our… Read More

Work or exercise?

My friends go to a gym to exercise, I don’t. I really like strenuous activity; I just want something practical or beautiful to come of it. I love doing hard… Read More