An eye-opening study of a growing industry, featuring a plethora of tips and advice for any reader, from patient to...
In this nonfiction exploration of the complexities and limitations of modern health care, Collins looks closely at the prescribing, testing and treatment practices of physicians across the nation and attempts to show readers how to be better informed when visiting the doctor.
Collins doesn’t simply offer a warning to get a second opinion, as many physicians do. Instead, she breaks down the industry phase by phase, exploring the factors that influence prescription writing, test ordering and diagnoses. For example, readers are warned in one chapter that doctors are provided incentives to sell one medication over others. An oblivious patient, particularly one who already feels convinced about a medication due to advertising and the media, might sign off on a medication routine, not knowing of the doctor’s questionable bias. The author spends an exhaustive chapter raising awareness about external factors that influence the treatment patients can expect from the industry. This chapter alone makes the book worthwhile to a reader less familiar with the modern, media-influenced world doctors and patients both face. Collins also discusses the phenomenon of “overtreatment” and the effects the growing pharmaceutical industry has had on providing treatment. Collins describes one point in her career as an emergency physician when four new drugs were entering the market every month—and not solely due to groundbreaking discoveries. Many new drugs are simply enhancements or variations of older drugs, and as they saturate the market, physicians have a difficult time keeping up with the information. The author paints a clear picture of the ways in which multiple industries feed off one another to create a system that appears to be more about profits and bottom lines than delivering premium health care to Americans. The book is not all gloom and doom, though. Collins also documents ways in which health care has changed for the better since she began her career in the emergency room nearly four decades ago, and while encouraging readers to become more informed and aware of healthy practices versus quick fixes, she points out that doctors are people, too. She ties up the work with suggestions for changes in the industry, including a larger focus on food as medication and preventive, rather than prescriptive, medicine.
An eye-opening study of a growing industry, featuring a plethora of tips and advice for any reader, from patient to physician.Pub Date: May 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0988936508
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Whitegrass Press
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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