Stephen Koch

How about digital reading of the newspaper?

I have the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal  delivered daily to both my door and to my Nook, so that after six weeks of digital reading, I can compare the paper-paper and the e-paper. And I conclude that the digital newspaper has enhanced my reading of the news.

But that may be just me. I have ADD, and though it is well-medicated, my daily paper is usually a daily adventure in distractibility. Headlines everywhere! Stories everywhere! My wandering ADD eye just won’t keep still. 

 We ADD types are wonderful beginners and not-so-wonderful finishers, and that goes for the paper, too.  My Times and Journal are daily romps through a bunch of scattered unfinished paragraphs and sparking, but not quite fired up interests. I never finish the print versions of the Times and  Journal. I abandon them, and walk away in a fog of semi-knowing.

The dedicated reader changes that, because it changes my focus. The e-paper presents me with a daily list of sections and stories, with their opening words. I am looking at a menu, not the whole delicious but uneatably-abundant smorgasbord spread before me on the breakfast table. And so I choose only what really interests me, And I ignore what doesn’t. 

Lo and behold! I find that on the reader I not only begin the news story. I finish it. Every time. And often reread it. What’s more, I get it. 

Blessed focus!

The downside? Well, my dedicated reader is terrible with pictures, and it is no substitute for the truly marvelous picture editing of the Times. (E-delivery to a desktop is much better in this respect.) And as a lifelong clipper of the paper, (it helps me focus), I wish my e-subscriptions came with a cut-and-paste function, or at least the highlight-and-note capacity that’s already there for e-books. But no.

Even so… two cheers for the digital newspaper! It leaves me better informed, and reading it soaks up much less of my time. I finish the Times and Journal now.

This is just a heads-up, but it’s about a very big story that may be coming to you soon. Be warned: my credentials for assessing this story add up to exactly zip. I may be married to a doctor, (she hasn’t yet read the book), and we may count a busload of doctors and medical researchers among our friends, but when it comes to judgments about medicine science, I’m just another sort of well-informed guy.

So don’t take my word for it.

BUT:

There is a strong possibility that a French physician and researcher named Olivier Amiesen has found a readily available pharmacological cure for alcoholism. Not a treatment. A cure. A the-problem-is-just-plain-gone cure.

Finito.

Dr. Ameisen made his discovery in a desperate and very moving effort to save his own life from alcohol addiction. Is anyone foolish enough to object to that? The man is a brilliant professional who after being defeated in every treatment—from A.A. to multiple rehab—knew his addiction was going to kill him, and soon, unless he found some way out. Calling upon his brilliant professionalism, he found a way out, and what may be a cure. In any case, he is no longer alcoholic, and neither are many others who’ve learned of his discovery.

You’ll find the whole story in his book. just out: The End of My Addiction.

Now, hold on. Just hold on. Before you navigate away and toss my “heads up” into the laughing-stock bin with Laetrile, shark cartilage, macrobiotic food, and a thousand other crank “cures,” hear me out. Dr. Ameisen is anything but a crank. Apart from his illness, he is an almost embarrassingly impressive pillar of the medical establishment, the very model of a major man of medicine. His publisher, Farrar Straus, is likewise excruciatingly respectable. Last and least, The End of My Addiction has passed the test of my own layman’s bullshit detector even when that detector was cranked up all the way to “high.”

And so, while we wait (and wait) for the Times to pronounce itself, I’m standing up to tell you that if alcohol addiction has ever touched your life—directly or indirectly, in some way, through somebody—you should know about this book.

I am not going recap the story or the research here. I’m here to say only that either this discovery is some sort of mistake, or it is major news. Major major. So go to the website. Get the book. Keep an open mind.

If Dr. Ameisen is wrong…well, okay. Tough luck for humanity. If he is partly right, good: What’s the next step? And if he is just plain right—and there’s a real chance he’s just plain right—this could be very, very big.