Trinkets and souvenirs rarely interest me when I travel, but I find it almost impossible to pass by a farm stand selling local honey. Each of the half dozen varieties lining my kitchen shelves has a particular use: a thick, full-bodied Blackberry honey from the Virginia hills is best drizzled over fresh fruit, while scarce honey from Sourwood tree blossoms found in the mountains of North Carolina is perfect on toast. However my most recent acquisition, Babcock’s Wilderness Nectar, had remained unopened since I purchased it from the gift shop at Crescent B Ranch in south central Florida.

Smaller alligator suns on a swamp log

I’d gone to the Crescent B to take a Swamp Buggy Eco-Tour of the ranch’s 90,000 acres of oak hammocks, pine woods, pastures, wetlands, and swamps, all located within the Babcock Wilderness Area. Swamps have always conjured images of black water, boot-sucking mud, and alligators submerged to their eyeballs, patiently waiting to chomp on a passing leg. To me these dank, dangerous places were devoid of beauty and to be avoided at all costs, thus it was with some trepidation that I boarded the old Bluebird school bus, long since painted in a khaki and olive drab camouflage, for my hour and a half tour.

Old Bluebird school bus grinds along rough sand tracks throughout the ranch

Our driver forced the rattletrap bus into gear and lurched onto a rough sand track. A moment later we sighted our first alligator, a foot long baby perched on a waterlogged branch in a drainage ditch. We rumbled across a brilliant chartreuse pasture and ducked into an unspoiled stand of moss-draped longleaf pine and Sawgrass Palmettos. On the other side, the forest opened onto a broad plain where cracker cattle Read the rest of this entry »

I cringe every time I see another commercial for a prescription drug. In the first place, I think we are over prescribed and over medicated in this country. I believe doctors rely far too much on medicines that mask symptoms, rather than trying to discover and treat the root cause of the malady.

Frankly, I am astounded that advertisements for prescription drugs even work. In his book, Death by Prescription, Ray D. Strand looks at these high figures and poses the question: Why do pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars on direct-to-consumer advertising, when consumers can only obtain prescriptions for these drugs through a doctor? Pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t spend millions of dollars on advertising if it wasn’t working. In fact it is working all too well. Strand writes that when a patient comes into a doctor’s office and requests a specific drug that he has seen advertised in the media, the doctor writes the exact prescription the patient requested more than 70 percent of the time! The result? Read the rest of this entry »