Drug Dealer, MD

Drug Dealer, MD / Anna Lembke, 172 pgs.

We can read a lot about the epidemic of addition to prescription pain medication.  I've read and blogged about several books within the last year or so.  This book is a little different.  Lembke treats addicts but only after educating herself after medical school and residency.  When she started out, she specifically said she would NO treat addicts because she felt like she didn't have the training necessary.  She learned pretty quickly that many of her patients were addicted to something and that almost NO one was there to treat them.  This book is a fascinating look at how we have developed a system that has directly lead to many of the problems we are facing now.  Can this be fixed?  Will it be fixed?  When everything focuses on money instead of treatment, there isn't a lot of room for reform.  This is a through-provoking work that deserves to be read widely.

The Black Tower

The Black Tower by Louis Bayard  352 pp.

What if the young Dauphin Louis Charles, son of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had not died in a cell in the notorious "Temple" prison but was smuggled out of the prison and grew to adulthood. That is the premise of this novel. Vidocq, chief of the new plainclothes police force disrupts the quiet life of Hector Carpentier after mistaking him for his late father, a physician while investigating a murder. The senior Carpentier had treated the sick prince in the Temple. Did he, with the help of others, carry him out of the prison inside a hobby horse? If not, then who is the gentle young man rescued by Vidocq and the younger Carpentier? The story has lots of twists and puzzles and the ending leaves you wondering if something like that could have happened and how it would have changed history. 

Falling into the Fire: a Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis / Christine Montross 239 pp.

Montross is a young-ish practicing psychiatrist and very fine writer.  She presents case studies of various patients and delves into the ethical, financial, legal and emotional aspects of treating these patients.  In the most memorable portion, she describes in detail a young woman who visits the same emergency room on a very regular basis, always because she has swallowed dangerously sharp metal objects.  She cannot be cured of this behavior, seemingly, but her repeated treatments to remove the objects and stabilize her mentally are fantastically expensive and consume vast amounts of staff time and supervision.  Montross is not afraid to express her own vulnerabilities in the face of this and other challenging situations.  Fluid and fascinating.