An informative and compassionate chronicle of Heilig’s own growth as a physician and researcher.
Heilig sums up what he has learned during his 20 years as a physician and researcher in the treatment of alcohol and other addictive disorders.
The author is a specialist in the field of neuropsychopharmacology, and he has treated patients and directed research for two decades in the United States and Sweden. Heilig subscribes to the view that “addiction is inherently a chronic, relapsing disease, not much different from…hypertension, diabetes, or asthma,” which, while not curable, can be successfully managed so that sufferers can lead productive lives. Continued abuse of an addictive substance creates transformations in the brain that create a physiologically based need for the drug in order to avoid the pain of withdrawal as well as the necessity of taking a higher dose to experience pleasure. Environmental factors such as stress can trigger recurring drinking bouts, even in cases where patients have not ingested alcohol for a sustained period and no longer suffer from symptoms of withdrawal. The author also examines the genetic component of addiction. In the case of drinking, it is connected to the ability of alcoholics to get pleasurably drunk without experiencing immediate negative consequences such as nausea, dizziness, or blackout. While there is consensus within the medical community that alcoholism is a disease, its chronic nature is not yet sufficiently recognized and requires continued medical intervention. Heilig reports on his own research, which involves studying how the brain's neural circuitry is hijacked by addictive substances that trigger the release of high doses of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which creates the perception of pleasure. His aim is to develop counteractive drugs that have minimal side effects. Heilig writes compassionately of the problems of patients caught in the grip of addiction whose lives often spiral out of control despite their struggle to remain sober. There are “two perspectives" he writes,"of science and humanism," which "are inseparable in any area of medicine, but perhaps most so in psychiatry and addiction medicine."
An informative and compassionate chronicle of Heilig’s own growth as a physician and researcher.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-231-17236-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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