December 23rd, 2011 by Jessie Gruman, Ph.D. in Book Reviews, Health Policy
Tags: ACA, Book, CFAH, Dissecting American Health Care: Commentaries on Health Policy and Politics, Doug Kamerow, Essays, health care, Health Care Reform, Health Policy, Jessie Gruman, National Public Radio, NPR, Public Health
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My friend and former Chair of the CFAH Board of Trustees, Doug Kamerow, has written a book that I think you will like.
Besides being a mensch and witty as heck, Doug is a family doctor and a preventive medicine specialist. In his new book, Dissecting American Health Care: Commentaries on Health Policy and Politics, these four characteristics constitute the lens through which he comments on scores of events, controversies and changes in public health and health policy that have taken place over the past four years. For example, Doug writes about last year’s debate over the H1N1 vaccine, the papal position on condoms and HIV, how prevention fared in the health care reform act (ACA) and his attempt to Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Prepared Patient Forum: What It Takes Blog*
October 1st, 2011 by KennyLinMD in Book Reviews, Opinion
Tags: Book, Cancer Screening, Decisions, Harvard, Health Policy Program, Health-related choices, How Doctors Think, Jerome Groopman, New America Foundation, New Yorker, Oncology, Pamela Hartzband, PSA, Shannon Brownlee, Shared Decision-Making, Your Medical Mind
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Recently, I had a conversation with Shannon Brownlee (the widely respected science journalist and acting director of the Health Policy Program at the New America Foundation) about whether men should continue to have access to the PSA test for prostate cancer screening, despite the overwhelming evidence that it extends few, if any, lives and harms many more men than it benefits. She felt that if patients could be provided with truly unbiased information and appropriate decision aids, they should still be able to choose to have the test (and have it covered by medical insurance). Believing that one of the most important roles of doctors is to prevent patients from making bad decisions, I disagreed.
After reading Your Medical Mind, the new book by Harvard oncologist and New Yorker columnist Jerome Groopman, I think he would probably side with Brownlee’s point of view. Groopman, whose authoring credits include the 2007 bestseller How Doctors Think, and wife Pamela Hartzband, MD have written a kind of sequel to that book that could have easily been titled How Patients Think. Drawing on interviews with dozens of patients about a wide variety of medical decisions – from starting a cholesterol-lowering drug, to having knee surgery, to accepting or refusing heroic end-of-life interventions – the authors Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Common Sense Family Doctor*
August 18th, 2011 by Dr. Val Jones in Book Reviews
Tags: Amazon, Diet, Eric Marcotte, Evidence Based Medicine, Exercise, Fitness, Food Truths Food Lies, Healthy Eating, Weight Loss
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Food Truths, Food Lies, written by family physician Eric Marcotte, M.D., may be the most refreshingly evidence-based diet book of the decade. You will not find a single mention of super-foods, magical berries, or supplement “must-haves” in the entire book. What you will find is the cold, hard truth about why many Americans are overweight, and what it takes to become a healthy eater.
Marcotte writes for the average American – his simple language, matter-of-fact tone, and regular reminders of what the reader has learned, make for a quick and memorable read. Although it’s clear that Marcotte has carefully distilled his dietary advice from the scientific literature, he refrains from burdening the reader with too many footnotes and references. Instead, he has created a kind of Cliff’s Notes of nutrition, having done the “heavy sifting” for us. What remains are the most basic principles underlying all healthy eating, such as:
*You can’t exercise your way to weight loss (i.e. you can’t outrun your own mouth – it’s much easier to eat more calories than you burn) Read more »
July 27th, 2011 by CodeBlog in Book Reviews, Interviews
Tags: Author Interview, Cardiac Surgery, Heart Health, ICU, Intensive Care Unit, Nurse, Opening My Heart, Post-Surgery Depression, Published Nurses, Recovery, RN, Tilda Shalof
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Well, not my heart.
I was contacted awhile ago and asked if I wanted the chance to read and review Tilda Shalof’s new book, Opening My Heart. (Amazon link, but NOT an affiliate link – I live in California and due to a new law, Amazon has cut all ties with us).
I had the chance to include a story in a book that Tilda edited a couple of years ago called Lives in the Balance. So I had fond memories 
I’ll say up front that I enjoyed the book. I had a range of emotions while reading it – frustration, worry, happiness. Frustration because although Tilda is a very experienced ICU nurse, she doesn’t take her own health seriously at all. I read with disbelief as she described her incredible denial of the obvious need to treat the heart condition she was born with.
I was amused at her doctor’s and husband’s reactions when she tried to tell them that if anything went wrong with her surgery, she didn’t want to be kept alive on machines. She explained that she used to have a dog and her husband absolutely refused to euthanize the miserable thing. I liked this passage in particular: “To Ivan, love means never stopping love or giving up. This is what families say. They can’t let go because of love. I hope no one loves me this much, ICU nurses often say to one another.”
Amen, sister.
Tilda writes about Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at code blog - tales of a nurse*
July 23rd, 2011 by Dinah Miller, M.D. in Book Reviews, Opinion
Tags: Book Review, Crazy, Crazy: Tales on and off the couch, Graduate School, Ph.D., Psychiatry, Psychology, Rob Dobrenski, Sex Education, ShrinkTalk.net, Talk Therapy, Therapy
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Rob Dobrenski, PhD. is a psychologist who blogs over on ShrinkTalk.net. He’s written a book about what it’s like to be a psychology graduate student, a psychotherapy patient, and a psychologist. Oh, we like the folks who go from Shrink blog to Shrink book — it somehow feels familiar — and so I agreed to read his book: Crazy: Tales on and Off the Couch.
So bear with me while I tell you that the book rubbed me wrong at the outset. Dr. Dobrenski begins by saying something to the effect that he describes things that all shrinks feel, and if they say they don’t, they aren’t being honest. I really hate it when people tell me what I feel. It’s like saying that Prozac made your depression better and if it didn’t, then you just didn’t recognize it. And then the book gets off on a provocative start — Rob discovers that many people in his life, from a patient, to a colleague, to himself — are “f***ing crazy.” The asterisks are mine. Dr. Dobrenski had no trouble using the word — I counted 19 times in the 39 pages, including in direct quotes of discussions he has with both a patient and one of his supervisors. Not in a million years. I wasn’t sure what the point was. To let people know he knows obscene words? To be Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*
