Inhaling the Dec. 6 issue of The New York Review of Books, which has no sports section nor even hardly a chuckle, I found Ricky Williams' name sprinkled throughout a deeply serious article on Big Pharma. The running back's appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2002 was described as a revealing example of the faulty way we organize health care in this country.
What did he do there? He said he was shy. Aw, the Heisman Trophy winner, leading rusher (then) in the NFL, was painfully and chronically shy. I remember it myself, it made quite a splash in the media. Big tough football player turns out to be shy.
In earlier times, this might have been seen as virtue, a sign of modesty, a quiet personality. Now, however, it's a disorder.
Enter Big Pharma. The article reveals that Ricky Williams' appearance was organized by the PR firm Cohn & Wolfe, working for GlaxcoSmithKline (GSK), paying the star "an undisclosed sum," and later a GSK press release placed his name on this statement:
As someone who has suffered from social anxiety disorder, I am so happy that new treatment options, like Paxil CR, are available today to help people with this condition.
Thank you, Ricky. Let us all ponder how many shy folks asked their doctors for a prescription. And who paid for it.
Reviewer Frederick Crews says this world is one where "choices regarding health care are manufactured along with the products that will match them." And "the pharmaceutical companies haven't so much answered a need as turbocharged it."
This is one of the ways we get to our insanely costly health care system, in which expensive pills are a mainstay. And it's not as safe as we'd like. In one of the books under review here, "Let Them Eat Prozac," author David Healy shows how the dangers of dependency, suicide and homicide became known only after years of use of Prozac.
Another book under review, "The Loss of Sadness," by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield, delves into the way that the manual psychiatrists use to balance disorder and treatment fails to clarify the difference between a serious disorder and a natural sadnesss following misfortune.
A better balance, he said, would place a brake "on the expensive middle-class hypochondria that the drug companies have so assiduously encouraged and exploited."
I'm hoping that Ricky Williams will just take a couple Ibuprofen for his aches and pains now, and not get into anti-depressants. Who knows, it could lead him to dangerous drugs and wreck his career.
Here's the link to the ever-brilliant NYRB.
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