A valuable corrective text for our overmedicated nation.
According to this expert skeptical account, there is less to many medical interventions than meets the eye.
Offit, a professor of pediatrics whose books include Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong (2017), begins each chapter with the history of a belief or treatment and why it became popular, and then he describes the research showing why it’s ineffective and sometimes positively harmful. Regardless, too often, these remedies remain popular. Antibiotic eye drops rarely cure pinkeye. Antioxidants and vitamin E can contribute to cancer. Giving testosterone to older men doesn’t improve their sex lives but doubles the risk of a heart attack. Sunscreen doesn’t prevent skin cancer. Readers may be shocked to read that many studies designed to measure the efficacy of mammograms in preventing breast cancer deaths find no benefit. Other studies disagree, and this is an area of fierce debate. Offit writes that mammograms may save lives, but the effect is not as dramatic as once thought. The prostate specific antigen test measures a blood chemical sometimes elevated in prostate cancer but sometimes elevated for other reasons. Many experts agree with the author that it does more harm than good. Some worthless treatments are blasts from the past. As a cure for the common cold, Vitamin C peaked in the 1970s with Nobel Prize–winning Linus Pauling’s research. Today, enthusiasts still consider it miraculous, but it’s no more so than other vitamins. That teething causes fever is a Victorian belief that has achieved new life with the internet; ditto the conviction that amalgam dental fillings contain poison and should be replaced. Medical organizations such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Family Physicians discourage most of the practices that Offit condemns. Physician inertia often hinders their work, but so does patient demand. Most readers know that doctors dispense too many unnecessary antibiotics, but research has shown that “no…factor was as strongly associated with patient satisfaction as receipt of a prescription for an antibiotic.”
A valuable corrective text for our overmedicated nation.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-294749-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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