A call and for action and a plan for it as well. Though not intended as a comprehensive reference, Over Dose is a source of...
A well-planned and documented exposé of how pharmaceutical companies market drug information and how their one-size-fits-all dosage recommendations harm patients.
Cohen (Family and Preventive Medicine; Psychiatry/Univ. of California, San Diego) charges that drug companies adopt an overly simplistic approach in recommending dosages and that unnecessarily high ones increase the risk of damage or even deadly side effects. He illustrates the problems created by overdoses of such popular drugs as Prozac, Viagra, estrogen formulations, and medications for cholesterol reduction and control of hypertension. Because older people frequently require lower dosages, he devotes an entire chapter to the medications most likely prescribed for seniors, calling on drug companies to determine the lowest safe and effective doses and to publish this information in the Physician’s Desk Reference (PDR) and in package inserts. While doctors generally rely on data in the annual PDR given them gratis by the industry, he says, this information is based on limited studies and rarely updated. Urgently needed is a comprehensive, independent, and current drug reference readily accessible to all physicians and patients. Further, Cohen examines drug companies’ manipulation of research and handling of research findings, and he looks at the relationship between the drug industry and the FDA, suggesting reforms to strengthen that agency and calling for establishment of a national medication safety board to monitor the safety of new drugs and develop strategies for improving the dissemination of information about them. His own rule of thumb is to start low and go slow, though he prudently cautions readers not to halt or adjust their own medications without consulting a doctor.
A call and for action and a plan for it as well. Though not intended as a comprehensive reference, Over Dose is a source of useful drug information, much of it tabulated at chapter ends for easy consultation.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2001
ISBN: 1-58542-123-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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