A venom-packed rant - Just to make 'em feel better ... or let the medicos make more money

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In my continuing effort to torque the entire planet, I come to you today with this well-thought and well-researched statement.

Addiction is not a disease. Ergo, alcoholism is not a disease. Neither is drug addiction, tobacco addition.

Neither is being fat.

So what is disease? Disease is the body and it's functions being knocked out of the normal range of function.

"Yeah well, Baker, alcoholism causes that!"

Yes. It can. But, being poisoned is not a disease by anyone's interpretation of the word "disease." Poisons alter the body's functions. Being in a wreck is not a disease. If you survive a wreck, you may come out with body parts that no longer work as they used to. You may even be missing body parts. Eating fugu can kill you and people die every year from eating it. They do so anyway. It's not a disease.

And not 1 is a disease.

Disease is involuntary. Addiction is completely and totally voluntary.

For that matter, there are a LOT of things people do every day because they want to which can kill, maim cripple, disfigure, wound, permanently alter body function and shape. No one calls Base Jumping a disease. I could go on.

"Baker, you have no idea what you're talking about. You are an idiot."

That could be, but I am an idiot who has overcome three addictions. At no time during the addictions I had did I feel any of them was a disease.

Addiction is a behavior driven by a personal decision.

Addiction is a problem you can control. Disease is something outside your direct control.

THE CASE FOR DISEASE

On alcoholism, the Mayor Clinic says "Alcoholism is a chronic and often progressive disease that includes problems controlling your drinking, being preoccupied with alcohol, continuing to use alcohol even when it causes problems, having to drink more to get the same effect (physical dependence), or having withdrawal symptoms when you rapidly decrease or stop drinking. If you have alcoholism, you can't consistently predict how much you'll drink, how long you'll drink, or what consequences will occur from your drinking."

In the above statement the word "you" or a derivative was used or understood to be used more than 10 times. Each time the word "you" is used, it is directly connected to a voluntary action.

THE CASE AGAINST DISEASE

As much as I don't like the idea, the federal gummint agrees with me, sort of. "The specific disease concept, associated mainly with the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, is contradicted by empirical evidence and unhelpful for preventive and treatment responses to problem drinking, especially for the effort to detect and modify problem drinking at an early stage." National Center for Biotechnology Information

The debilitating effects alcoholism stop when drinking stops, except when a person has ruined their body to the point it cannot recover. Cirrhosis of the liver, caused by a lifetime of drinking, is a disease. Yup.

Bashing your head with a hammer will eventually crack your skull and if you keep going, you'll damage your brain. That's not a disease.

Addiction is only disease I know of that is totally, completely and 100 percent within the control of the person with the disease.

Don't wanna be an alcoholic? Quit drinking. Don't wanna be addicted to something? Quit.

"It ain't that easy, Baker."

The value of anything is directly related to the effort put into it. In slightly different wording, nothing worth doing is every easy.

Either quit or do not whine to me about your addiction. Before I quit listening to you, I will ridicule you and probably do it maliciously.

With all this being said, I point out the American Medical Association has just declared obesity to be a disease.

It's not. Some in the AMA agree with me.

The AMA decision was not unanimous. Reporting in the NY Times, Andrew Pollack wrote, "In making the decision, delegates at the association’s annual meeting in Chicago overrode a recommendation against doing so by a committee that had studied the matter."

Why did the AMA decide being fat is a disease? Mo Money.

Money. Period. By declaring a decision to overeat and not move around enough to burn off the extra calories, the AMA positions its members to make majorly much more money from insurance companies and the government. In other words, your decision to be fat suddenly becomes the responsibility of everyone who has the same insurance company as you (if you have insurance) and-or taxpayers if you have Medicare or Medicaid OR you must rely on charity - indigent care - which puts the bill on insurance companies and taxpayers who pick up your bill through higher rates and more taxes to the gummint health care programs. Them doctors and nurses ain't working for free and I don't blame 'em.

If you are fat and do not wish to be, then lose weight. Eat less. I absolutely guarantee without question that if you take in 900 calories a day and burn 901 calories a day, you will lose weight. Wanna burn more calories? Move more.

As in the past, I expect some people to whine at me that they cannot lose weight. No. They do not want to lose weight. Go on an African bushman diet and see how much you weigh at the end of a week. Stick to it for a while and soon you too will be incredibly thin.