12/07/2025
Can we talk about how by current U.S. medical standards, if you have a glass of wine every night with dinner, you are an alcoholic? I wondered if that is also the definition in France and went looking.
If you tell your U.S. doctor that you have wine every day, it doesn’t matter if it is just one glass, you will get the wide-eye from your doctor like you just confessed to freebasing Merlot behind the Safeway. Meanwhile in France, Italy, Spain — you know, civilization — a glass of wine with dinner is simply called Tuesday. Nobody over there is diagnosing you as an alcoholic for enjoying what they consider a food group.
And here’s the important nuance: Europeans don’t judge alcohol by the number of drinks — they judge by the behavior.
A French, German, or Dutch doctor is looking for things like:
• Do you lose control once you start drinking?
• Are you drinking in secret or lying about it?
• Are you drinking in the morning or to steady your nerves?
• Is alcohol causing relationship, work, or legal problems?
• Can you not stop once you intend to?
These are markers of dependence. A single glass with dinner is not. In Europe, wine is part of cuisine, not a moral failing. They don’t outsource their common sense to a chart written by insurance companies. Americans, meanwhile, depend on their doctor to do all the thinking — even when the doctor is following guidelines cooked up in a boardroom with actuaries with no consideration to the health of the people.
But the wine thing isn’t even what set me off today. Somewhere in the last 15 years, American healthcare decided that one appointment = one body part, and if you have a second concern, you must drag your carcass back another day so they can bill twice. I went in with an infected ankle and matching sores on my fingers — same pattern, same cause, same human body. They treated the ankle and told me to book a second appointment for the fingers. (Note, I used the medicine for my ankle on my fingers and both cleared up.)
But that rule is not medicine. That rule makes them all look like they are doing administrative cosplay.
Do they do this in Europe? No. Absolutely not.
If you show up with three concerns in France or Germany or the Netherlands, the doctor treats all three — because (brace yourself) you are one human being and not a series of billable modules.
Maybe this is why Europeans live longer. They treat the body as a whole, not as a punch card. And in Europe, they’re not trying to wrestle your glass of wine away like it’s a gateway to ruin — they’re too busy practicing actual healthcare.
America doesn’t have a medical system; it has a medical business model pretending to be a health care system.
My thoughts for this winter morning, for what they are worth.
