“On No Work of Words
On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody
Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body
I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft:
To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given
Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven,
The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.
To lift to leave from the treasures of man is pleasing death
That will rake at last all currencies of the marked breath
And count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark.
To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.
Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas
If I take to burn or return this world which is each man's work.”
Source: Collected Poems
“Could it be that despite all the years I spent in medical school and residency training acquiring specialized knowledge and practical skills, that this expertise mattered little to my patients' overall health?”
Source: Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine
“Wrong eating is the disease.
Right eating is the medicine.”
“Our body is intelligent; we are stupid.”
“There is more mental health cure found in a pile of dirt than in all the behavioral therapy and drugs in modern medical science.”
Source: Paleo Family: Raising Natural Kids in an Unnatural World
“The pathway to health is really a process of rebirth.”
Source: Getting Well Again
“But maintaining the primacy of the individual-lifestyle focus—without being transparent about larger influences—is an affront to people living in disadvantage, as it reduces their ill health to poor “choices”and blames them, all the while contributing to the stigma and judgmental thinking that fuels their oppression, worsens their health, and expands the health divide between the advantaged and disadvantaged.”
Source: Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight
“Don't tell God how big your problems are. Tell your problems how big your God is.”
Source: Surviving Cancerland: Intuitive Aspects of Healing
“By 1980, the economic theory of neoliberalism, with its faith in free markets, property rights, and individual autonomy, had begun to reshape cultural notions of good citizenship. The good citizen was increasingly imagined as an autonomous, informed individual acting responsibly in his or her own self-interest, primarily through the market, as an educated consumer. Dovetailing with the new health consciousness, the ethos of neoliberalism shifted the burden of caring for the well-being of others from the state to the individual and recast health as a personal pursuit, responsibility, and duty. As the burden of solving social problems and preserving the health of individuals shifted from the public to the private sector, alternative dietary ideals reinforced the increasingly important social values of personal responsibility and consumer consumption.”
Source: Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health
“For those of us who can and do choose to 'eat right,' understanding the cultural politics of dietary health presents a particular kind of call to awareness and accountability. Given its social and moral freight, eating right is a kind of unexamined social privilege. It is not unlike and is clearly connected to other forms of privilege that usually go unnoticed by the people who possess them, such as whiteness and thinness. Choosing socially sanctioned diets makes subtle but very powerful claims to morality, responsibility, and fitness for good citizenship. We who are lucky enough to have eating habits that align with dietary ideals or inhabit the kinds of bodies that imply we do may think that our shapes or healthy preferences are a sign of our virtue, the result of will, or perhaps nothing more than a lucky twist of fate, but history shows that there are cultural mechanisms that produce the seemingly natural alignment between ideal diets, ideal body sizes, and the habits and preferences of the elite.”
Source: Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health