It's eerily prescient.

That could be an ironic comment. Mainly because by the late 1980s, in this metro area there were private hospitals & clinics that were already starting to use late-night TV & radio ads to troll for upper middle-class families with troubles that could be blamed on recreational drugs, or 'spoiled' behavior by young adults. Local weekly newspapers eventually heard of abuses by clinic doctors & staff (& parents) and published investigative reporting. In general, the kids would have no objective advocates & the treatments would have no objective oversight. So that might have been happening over 30 years ago, but the sales pitch was pretty obvious when one saw it on TV. Parents could pay a for-profit clinic for behavioral therapy for their children, and the implication was that the clinic had to make sure that all the problems were the responsibility of the children.

I realized that within the last year, I've seen that this for-profit dis-functional system of advertising involuntary treatment is starting to show up again.

When I was a teen in the 1970s, I had constant problems with headaches. My family Physician prescribed high doses of Fiorinal or Bupap (Aspirin, Butalbital, Caffeine; sometimes known as ABC; with codeine phosphate). It caused hostility and aggression; I was literally beating people up.

I went to the eye doctor for a routine exam. When I mentioned the headaches, he diagnosed me with amblyopia (lazy eye). He showed me some eye exercises to perform several times a day. The headaches stopped completely within two weeks. My parents stopped renewing the Fiorinal prescription. The next time I saw the family doctor, I told him what the eye doctor told me and that my headaches had stopped. He was horrified, and informed my parents that (a) I wasn't taking my headaches seriously (after 45 years, I still don't know what that means) and that he thought I was abusing drugs and needed to start his program group immediately.

I think he was the one abusing drugs; read the horrors how about Butalbital here. My parents found a new physician for the family and we never looked back.

Now in his eighties, the doctor who prescribed the Fiorinal was brought up on charges of malpractice multiple times. He was fined on a number of occasions and had his license suspended for a year in the 1980s. Today, there is no mention of any of that; his history has be expunged from the internet, although the newspaper archives retail the traces of his misdeeds. He is regarded as a pillar of the community.

Now, let's talk about this doctor-fueled prescription opiate crisis.

Wow. That's an interesting interaction with the eye doctor. I have had migraine headaches, and I have read some doctors have discovered that there are various physical treatments or adjustments that can avert headache symptoms. Treatments that I read about had to do with massaging head or back muscles, or jaw adjustments.

It's actually not that small a town,and there were many other doctors in the area. Unfortunately, the one my mother did choose had a mild addiction issue of his own. My bad doctor helped hound him out of town. Do as I say, not as I do. Misdirection and all that.

The one thing I learned is that if you're going to be a miscreant, make sure you're the chairman of the overseeing board.

The family physician: My sympathies. I've also heard second-hand from people who encountered doctors with long-term problems. That can be devastating to a community when there are few choices for physicians or clinics.

It's an industry that makes money from treating disease. There's no profit in healthy patients.

That's the truth!