Stuart Fisher
I have a scientific and philosophical approach to life, and this documentary film makes a lot of sense to me. Humans beings are all different, and alcohol affects all of us differently. Most of us will have health issues of one kind or another as we go through life. One Little Pill presents the view that alcoholism should be treated as if it is like anything else that is medically wrong with us. As such, you can, and perhaps should, treat it with medication (in this case the one little pill of the title).The only negative thing I have to say is that I object a little to black and white assertions such as "If science revealed that what we know about alcoholism and its treatment was wrong.", but I think that's because I was brought up to understand that the words right and wrong are absolutes. In reality, I've found that absolutes in life are few and far between. In practice we often use the words right and wrong in a relative sense, or we use the word wrong to mean "doesn't work".In the context of the film I think Claudia is saying that prevailing theories about alcoholism are wrong, and that many of the treatments simply don't work. Scientifically, when we say that a theory is wrong we are normally expressing the view that the theory doesn't tally with our observations as well as we'd like. Hopefully, we are then going to present another theory that reflects the observations better, and that's exactly what this film does. Through a better understanding of the science, we are more likely to achieve the desired outcome (that the cycle of addiction is broken).What we can't really get from a film like this is how effective the Sinclair method actually is. You need scientific studies to tell you that. If it truly is better than other approaches and treatments, then of course we should definitely be doing much more to spread awareness about it.Finally, there's one other thing I think I should mention. I'm not religious, but I did pause the video to inspect one of the scenes we see near the beginning of the film. It is what appears to be a statue of a man in front of a building somewhere in Detroit, Michigan. There is some writing on the wall behind the statue. You can't see all the words, but it's this passage from 2 Corinthians: Now the Lord is that Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty.In addition to being a religious idea, Liberty is one of the principles upon which the United States of America is based. Addiction is something that takes away a person's liberty. This simple observation should motivate all of us to do something to help the millions of people who struggle with addiction every day. We should support the work that Claudia and the C3 Foundation are doing to reach out and help as many people as they can.
