An unevenly executed but often empowering guide for taking control of one’s health care experience.
Two doctors guide patients in how to be their own health care advocates and navigate the dizzying world of medical treatment.
Danziger, a professor of medicine, pharmacology, and physiology at the University of Illinois Chicago, and Gellens, a medical director and nephrologist at Baxter Healthcare, offer this book as a starting point for novice patients seeking advice for interacting with members of the medical community. It’s also aimed at those looking to get a better understanding of their own health. At its heart is an emphasis on “partnering” with one’s doctor by being prepared for appointments, communicating honestly about symptoms, and clearly expressing when one doesn’t understand something: “Your doctor isn’t an authority figure to be obeyed by a compliant patient. Those days are over,” the authors say, stressing that “you need to be able to talk to your doctor about your health concerns and not fear that you’ll be belittled or dismissed.” The authors encourage patients to research their symptoms by using a hodgepodge of sources, including leading medical journals. However, they could have dedicated more space to the importance of sorting through such information with a critical eye. However, the authors do their best to help patients parse scientific journal language, and they dedicate a chapter to tips for understanding such articles. The book also gently reminds readers that doctors aren’t perfect—diagnoses and treatments can be influenced by specialist bias, a lack of experience, the constraints of one’s insurance network, or even corruption. It also points out that diagnoses are often trial-and-error processes and that few solutions come fast and easy. However, this guide does sometimes feel like an attempt to lighten the burden of blame that falls on medical doctors when diagnoses and treatments don’t work in a patient’s favor. The book also turns medical conditions into systematic puzzles while glossing over the emotional toll that chronic conditions can take. In addition, it underemphasizes the degree to which minority populations are disadvantaged in a health care system with demonstrably inequitable practices.
An unevenly executed but often empowering guide for taking control of one’s health care experience.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-578-34127-9
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Kamoh Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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
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