A thoroughly convincing, mobilizing, and supremely optimistic call to action for medical industry reform.
A discourse on the need for improved patient-centered health care.
Montori, a Mayo Clinic physician and clinical researcher, sternly criticizes the shortcomings of the contemporary medical establishment and discusses the barriers in place that prevent patients from accessing the compassionate, effective treatment that they deserve. His nonprofit organization, The Patient Revolution, was founded in 2016 to advance and promote more thoughtful and careful clinical care, and all the proceeds from sales of this book will support its work. Its tenets are fully represented in the text, which aims to draw attention to the benefits of a doctor-patient relationship that is built on personalized communication and unhurried professionalism. “Industrial healthcare is killing the healer’s soul,” Montori writes, and his proactive, multipart work moves through varying aspects of modern health care while taking direct aim at the problems plaguing it. In a series of illuminating and provocative essays and patient profiles, the author draws on positive and negative field observations from his own medical training in Peru and from his clinical practice in the United States. He spotlights an illogical patient prescription system that he says “fails the stress test of kindness”; how hospital accounting departments partner with agencies to pressure patients for payment; and how executive corruption scandals have fractured industry reputations. All of these aspects dehumanize patients, Montori notes, and systematically cause the overall deterioration of medical-care consortiums. Perhaps the most indicting and distressing chapter is one on corporate avarice. The author cites greed as the motivating principle in modern health care, writing that the industry “has shifted its focus from patient care and instead has honed in on achieving goals that are industrial and financial.” Money is the primary focus now, he insists, with industry establishments enticing consumers with advertisements and promises of results that play on their hopes, fears, and primal insecurities. Not one to shy away from provocative declarations, Montori openly accuses pharmaceutical and medical device companies of extortion, and, in laymen’s terms, he tells how their profit-over-patient concept operates. He also incorporates patient stories from his own practice as a diabetes physician which effectively shows how consumers manage chronic ailments in addition to the struggles and demands of modern life. Many things get lost as patients rush into and out of doctors’ offices, Montori asserts, including patients’ personal lives, support for self-care, and even baseline humanity—all in an effort to increase efficiency and profit margins. As one possible solution among many others, the author advocates for what he calls “minimally disruptive care,” promoting easily accessible programs with continuous, coordinated services. On the whole, Montori’s treatise is both manageably sized and authoritatively written, and it delivers a powerful, revolutionary manifesto. It includes curative action items to abolish what the author sees as the incidental cruelty of medical care. Readers who are similarly frustrated with the state of the American health care industry will find an ally and a sympathetic voice in Montori’s work.
A thoroughly convincing, mobilizing, and supremely optimistic call to action for medical industry reform.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9993948-1-6
Page Count: 120
Publisher: The Patient Revolution
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
