Valuing Others

By Richard P. Holm MD

This week, in our little town in South Dakota, a young man in his twenties came into my office weeping and scratching his arms and legs. I was expecting a rash-type problem, when he blurted out that he was injecting methamphetamine two to four times a day. “It has destroyed my life,” he said. “I used to have a job, insurance, a house, and a life. Now I have nothing. Please help me,” he cried. I did my best for him.

By definition addiction is the state of physical or psychological dependence on a drug, which is liable to have a damaging effect. It’s a habit, a compulsion, or an obsession, which turns around and bites the user and everyone nearby. Alcoholism is the most pervasive and obvious addiction in our society. If it doesn’t directly affect you, most certainly it affects someone dear to you.

The potential for addiction is part of our collective human nature. I dare say that every one of us given just the right situation would be addicted to one drug or another, whether it be cigarettes, pain medicines, sleeping pills, marijuana, methamphetamine or a fine red wine.
What is it that separates the addict from normal happy people who are able to function in society? Some experts define addiction and, specifically, alcoholism with the four features of craving, loss of control, physical dependence, and tolerance. Others add that addiction means losing perspective about what has value in life. Vision of the surrounding world dims, and instead the addict obsesses on self and how to get another shot, pill, snort, drag, or drink. Addiction accelerates like a maelstrom into such selfness until nothing else exists.
It makes sense then that the opportunity for recovery comes with the sacred message of the Golden Rule: treating others with compassion and fairness. Valuing others is the key ingredient in order to sober- up the self-absorbed addicted individual. It is no wonder spiritual based programs for sobriety are the most successful.

No question, we are all at risk for the selfish cycle of addiction, and our best help comes by relearning how to care for others.

Protecting Little Girls

By Richard P. Holm MD



Lying on the rolling cot in the emergency room, the beautiful six-year-old little girl was unconscious with bruises on her head, face, and scattered over her body. “Please help her,” pleaded the woman with a baby in her arms. She told me the little girl had been trying to learn how to ride the bike her Daddy had just purchased for her, and I believed what the woman told me.



After the bleed into the brain was diagnosed the story unfolded, and I learned that the woman was not the mother of the injured girl, rather the girlfriend of the father and that the overwhelming evidence showed the physical abuse came from the girlfriend. No one had been there to protect that little girl, and she died a day later from severe head trauma.



Child abuse is only one kind of violence, which can occur between members of any group of people living together. The American Psychiatric Association defines domestic violence as control by one family member over another with some kind of physical, sexual, emotional and/or economic abuse. It comes down to an issue of power, where someone with the upper hand takes advantage of another.



The Centers for Disease Control states that we know about only one third of the cases, and estimates that domestic violence affects more than 32 million Americans, or over ten percent of the U.S. population.



Why does this happen? Is it because our human nature wants to put someone else down when feeling inadequate or angry with our self? Is it because children who are raised in a home where it is not safe learn to threaten and bully rather than to protect people close to them, and this kind of activity perpetuates itself?



No one should have to live in a home where someone with an upper hand abuses another person, a spouse, a partner, a child, or even an elderly parent. Our job in this family of humanity is to find ways to protect little girls and everyone else from those who are threatening abuse.