by Don Hall

In order to find temporary employment as I help care give my father in Kansas, I decided to apply to substitute teach here.

For those familiar with my bizarre, nomadic career path, you know that I as a Chicago Public School teacher throughout the nineties and even wrote a book about it entitled Strippers, Guns, and The Holocaust Museum: OR: How I Survived My Time as a Chicago Public School Music Teacher. I ended up losing my taste for teaching children (mostly due to the bureaucracy of the public school system at the time—a situation that decades later seems far worse than better) and moved on.

The best part of getting a teaching degree (as opposed to one in Philosophy, Theater, or Gender Studies) is that it doesn’t wear out. I can apply to and teach in any American public school which makes it a perfect fall-back in times of financial fuckery.

As this current moment is one of those times, I applied, filled out paperwork online, sent my transcripts, got fingerprinted. One of the requirements is to get both a physical and a TB test, so I scheduled an appointment with a local clinic (no personal doctor, no insurance) and went in. I waited a bit but not long. They pricked me for the TB test and commenced to the physical. The nurse did her thing, asking questions, poking and prodding.

“Do you have problems with persistent vomiting?”

“No.”

“Why did you mark yes on the vomiting?”

“The question doesn’t clarify ‘persistent’ but I have vomited before so I was trying to be thorough.”

She re-marked it “No.”

She finished. I waited. The doctor came in, perusing my chart.

“Looking good, Mr. Hall. Everything seems to paint you as perfectly healthy, except…”

“Except?”

“Your blood pressure is a little bit high.”

“A little bit like I’m going to die soon or a little bit, just a tad over normal?”

“You aren’t going to die from it. Did you gain some weight recently?”

“Yup. Put on about twenty pounds in the past four months. Long story. Lots of stress and hiding from an ex-wife.”

“Well, I can prescribe you with some blood pressure medication if you’d like.”

“Medication? Nah.”

She adds, almost apologetically, “You could also, you know, focus more on… exercise and diet.”

“Yeah. I joined a gym as soon as I landed here. Already dropped seven in the past three weeks. I know weight loss isn’t an instant thing but I’ll drop the weight. I dropped eighty pounds about fifteen years ago and only managed to bring back about thirty of that in that time. I’ll get it done.”

With that, I was outta there but the fact that her first inclination was to prescribe medication over exercise bothered me. During the very beginnings of the pandemic, while my ex-wife decided to through caution to the wind and sleep with strangers for cash, I found myself conflicted. I believed Fauci, knew that vaccines were coming from Big Pharma, but was also watching Michael Keaton deal with the pernicious greed of that corporate monster in Hulu’s Dopesick and I had a hard time squaring the fact that the villains in the opioid crisis would come to our collective rescue with a vaccine. I mean, I got over it in that I vaxxed and boosted, wore my mask, and did my level best to be a respectful citizen but the gnawing in my brain wouldn’t subside.

Adding to my discomfort was the fact that, when COVID hit, it would have been simple to warn that those most at risk were fat, old, and immunocompromised but the current fear of offense prevented such a clear and obvious declaration. “Fat but healthy” just isn’t a real thing. As we dick around with the feelings of the Doritos and Coke class, we put them at serious risk, especially the poor. Instead of doubling down on ‘Eat a fucking salad and get off your ass and move some, chunky,” we miss the boat on actually helping those who need it most.

• The US obesity prevalence was 41.9% in 2017 – March 2020. (NHANES, 2021)

• From 1999 –2000 through 2017 –March 2020, US obesity prevalence increased from 30.5% to 41.9%. During the same time, the prevalence of severe obesity increased from 4.7% to 9.2%. (NHANES, 2021)

• Obesity-related conditions include heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer. These are among the leading causes of preventable, premature death.

• The estimated annual medical cost of obesity in the United States was nearly $173 billion in 2019 dollars. Medical costs for adults who had obesity were $1,861 higher than medical costs for people with healthy weight.

SOURCE

More fodder to chew is surfing through television (as opposed to streaming, my folks actually watch regular TV) and I land on a show called Man vs Food which is nothing more than an avatar for Americans overindulging in three-pound bagel sandwiches and five-pounds of nachos in a single sitting for viewing please. Also, the fucking commercials leveled at those who watch the local news is a fucking parade of pharmaceutical wonderment—depressed, low energy, or bulging eyes from a Thyroid condition? Take a pill! Yes, this pill might make you suicidal, bleed from your anus, instantly diabetic, and prevent you from ever procreating but, goddam it, you won’t have shingles, so there!

Christ, the most popular kind of pill in existence (beyond opioids) only work 15% of the time.

When looking at how the Affordable Care Act tabulates effective value-based outcomes, it turns out that the actual curing of the issue is far less important than medically altering or diminishing the symptoms. Hospitals get paid based upon the amount of drugs given rather than diseases cured. Why? Because Big Pharma writes the guidelines.

Maybe this doesn’t come as any big surprise to most of you. I’ve avoided going to doctors as much as possible but that’s because both when I was six and when I was twenty, I had medical professionals pronounce me dead within a short time span, both who were dead wrong. I outlasted the first by fifty years and second by thirty-six so they were as accurate as presidential pollsters were in 2016. I’m sure doctors and pharmacists and drug researchers are perfectly fine as human beings but the business they are in is as corrupt and heinous as Chicago real estate.

The result? I’ll take NyQuil when I have a head cold and Advil when my shoulder aches but treat most of my ailments with a strong dose of exercise, sleep, and decent, non-processed food. Except for COVID, which I received all the pertinent vaccines and still ended up getting.