Artificial Happiness - book review

I was a little disconcerted to realize as I was reading Artificial Happiness, the Dark Side of the New Happy Class by Ronald W. Dworkin, MD, PhD to find an underlying plot that wasn't obvious from reading the book jacket. Yes, the book is primarily about what modern Americans might be doing to themselves by recklessly using prescription drugs to deal with every day stress and conflict. Yes, the book suggests that children may be easier to deal with when taking their "medication" but at a significant cost to their development and coping skills.

But behind this concern of Dr. Dworkin is another concern, one that may even be more important to him - the fact that by using the new drugs, primary physicians have reasserted themselves back into the medical community and taken back patients that were deserting to the specialists in psychiatry, psychology, and anesthesiology (who apparently have a role in dispensing psychoactive drugs that I wasn't aware of). It's hard to tell sometimes which of these two concerns matters the most to doctors, to Americans, and certainly to Dr. Dworkin, an anesthesiologist by the way.

If pushing pills makes the ordinary general medicine, primary care physician as capable of solving medical problems as the specialist then maybe we need to look at why we have specialists. On the other hand, if the result is totally different and there is a quality of care issue here, then some medical researchers should determine that before insurance companies find out what they're paying for and before the legal profession does that for them.