Impassioned testimony of a fight for health.
A memoir that explores the idea that women with chronic illnesses need to rally for appropriate medical care.
Making her book debut, Ramey, a writer and musician (known as Wolf Larsen), recounts, with captivating zest, a sorry tale of suffering from a cluster of symptoms that defied diagnosis. “I thought I was the strangest medical case on the East Coast,” she writes, only to discover many others like herself. She was “a woman with a mysterious illness,” a WOMI, chronically exhausted, aching, “likely in possession of at least one autoimmune disease,” and likely to go from physician to physician in search of understanding. The daughter of physicians, Ramey began her quest for help believing unquestioningly in “Magical Pillthink,” the notion “that if something is wrong, there is always a quick fix.” She visited countless specialists and was treated with a host of medications that sometimes temporarily relieved symptoms, but more often not. She experienced “extremely bad—and often explicitly abusive—medical care,” including botched surgeries. The author began to research her condition on her own, making some startling discoveries: the rise of autoimmune diseases in the last 30 years; the significance of the intestinal microbiome to digestive health and fatigue, aching, and “brain fog”; the role of antigens in producing an overactive immune response; physical and emotional traumas that can trigger WOMI symptoms; and microglia, tiny immune cells that protect the brain and nervous system that can become inflamed in response to a variety of stressors. Repeatedly prescribed antidepressants from frustrated doctors, Ramey indicts the medical establishment for its “contempt for women, and for the feminine,” and recommends the new approach of functional medicine, which holds that “diet, lifestyle, and attitude are the cornerstones of health” and incorporates “testing, treating, and stabilizing” the four systems involved in “modern chronic illnesses:” the gut, liver, immune system, and endocrine system. Finally, her condition improved through common-sense changes: “Sleep, movement, a nontoxic environment, and a well-nourished psyche,” Ramey concludes, are the basic needs for recovery.
Impassioned testimony of a fight for health.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-53407-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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