Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class - Hardcover

Dworkin M.D., Ronald W.

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9780786717149: Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786717149 ISBN 13: 9780786717149

Publisher: Carroll & Graf, 2006

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Ronald Dworkin, Fellow at the Hudson Institute, has written a book of social commentary that combines the politics of healthcare and medical ethics with several momentous changes that have dramatically altered the relationship among doctors and patients, creating what Dworkin dubs "artificial happiness." He examines the rise of psychotropic drugs; alternative medicine; the belief in endorphins as a way to maximize health through exercise; and medicine's investigations of spirituality — all during the past thirty years — fitting them together into a story that puts Americans at the center of a novel social experiment: helping people feel happy independent of the facts in their lives. Though well-intentioned, Dworkin identifies a dark side, asserting that Prozac, for instance, is freezing people in unsatisfactory relationships and jobs, nullifying their impulse to change, because of the "happiness" induced by the medicine.

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About the Author:

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. In 1996, his book The Rise of the Imperial Self: America's culture wars in Augustinian perspective was published by Rowman and Littlefield and favorably reviewed in magazines like Commonweal, World, and First Things. Between 1996 and 1998, while working as an anesthesiologist at Greater Baltimore Medical Center (since 1989), Dr. Dworkin was a regular contributor to the editorial page of the Baltimore Sun, writing on a variety of cultural and political issues. He also co-founded a public policy research organization in Maryland called the Calvert Institute, which continues to examine the whole range of state and local policy issues, especially in the areas of business, education, and health care. In 1998, he was the senior health policy advisor to Ellen Sauerbrey during her Maryland gubernatorial quest. In 1999, Dr. Dworkin joined the Hudson Institute as a Senior Fellow while continuing to work part-time as an anesthesiologist. His long essays on religion, medical science, and health care have appeared in The Weekly Standard, Commentary, The Public Interest, and Policy Review, and have led to appearances on both television and radio.

From Publishers Weekly:

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)
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