Better Health: Smart Health Commentary Better Health (TM): smart health commentary

Latest Posts

Book Review: The Water Giver

EverythingHealth strongly recommends a wonderful new book called “The Water Giver” and I predict you will not be able to put it down. Author Joan Ryan is a remarkable writer who takes the reader on a journey she lived when her son, Ryan, sustained a near -fatal severe head and brain injury on a skateboard. It is both a medical drama and a meditation on motherhood.

The book begins with Joan’s description of her son’s learning difficulties and years of psychological and developmental testing. Her style as a mother was to intellectualize, do research and try to fix what was “wrong” with her son. The years went by with family stress and teachers conferences and medical consultations but it wasn’t until the day he fell, that Joan realized some things are too big to be studied and fixed.

The nightmare began when he was 16 and went skateboarding without a helmet. The fall on a hill near their home caused a huge brain bleed that obliterated much of his brain tissue. He remained in a coma for weeks and underwent multiple surgeries to relieve pressure. The book chronicles months of near death events in the Intensive Care Unit that nearly drove his parents insane with worry. I will let you read it to find out how it turns out. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at EverythingHealth*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

Read more »

How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

Read more »

See all interviews »

Latest Cartoon

See all cartoons »

Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

Read more »

The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

Read more »

Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

Read more »

See all book reviews »

Commented - Most Popular Articles