New Books In Medicine

American healthcare is in crisis. It doesn’t have to be. Dr. Toby Cosgrove‘s The Cleveland Clinic Way: Lessons in Excellence from One of the World’s Leading Health Care Organizations (McGraw-Hill Education, 2014) is a blueprint for fixing what’s wrong with healthcare―and is a must-read for every leader seeking to transform his or her organization. There’s a revolution going on right now. On the frontiers of medicine, some doctors have developed an approach for treating people that is more effective, more humane, and more affordable. It’s an approach to healthcare that has captured the attention of the media and business elite–and the President of the United States. It’s all happening at Cleveland Clinic, one of the most innovative, forward-looking medical institutions in the nation. In this groundbreaking book, the man who leads this global organization, Cosgrove reveals how the Clinic works so well and argues persuasively for why it should be the model for the nation

The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was one of the greatest human disasters of all time. It infected a third of the people on Earth–from the poorest immigrants of New York City to the king of Spain, Franz Kafka, Mahatma Gandhi and Woodrow Wilson. But despite a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people, it exists in our memory as an afterthought to World War I. In this gripping narrative history, Laura Spinney traces the overlooked pandemic to reveal how the virus travelled across the globe, exposing mankind’s vulnerability and putting our ingenuity to the test. As socially significant as both world wars, the Spanish flu dramatically disrupted–and often permanently altered–global politics, race relations and family structures, while spurring innovation in medicine, religion and the arts. It was partly responsible, Spinney argues, for pushing India to independence, South Africa to apartheid and Switzerland to the brink of civil war. It also created the true “lost generation.”

Autism as a condition has received much focused attention recently, but less attention has been paid to its politics. It is a condition that necessitates significant accommodations and interventions, which can be difficult for people with autism and their loved ones to obtain, depending on the state of autism public policy. Sociologist John J. Pitney argues that political science needs to more rigorously study autism policy and politics, as he outlines in his book The Politics of Autism: Navigating the Contested Spectrum (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). In our interview, we explore the evolution of our understanding of autism, how public policy impacts the lives of autistic individuals, and suggestions for future research. For anyone with autism or their loves ones, this interview offers suggestions for meeting important needs and hope for a better future. John J. Pitney Jr., Ph.D. is the Roy P. Crocker Professor of American Politics at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author of The Art of Political Warf

Christy Ford Chapin, an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has written a history of the funding of America’s health care system: Ensuring America’s Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System (Cambridge University Press, 2015).  She begins with an account of the development of physicians’ practices in the mid-nineteenth century and traces the evolution of the American Medical Association’s role in shaping how physicians practiced medicine and how it was financed.  The advent of the insurance model for funding health care was a creation of the Progressive period and became dominant in the late 1930s, during the New Deal.  Chapin provides an account of the pitfalls of the insurance funding mechanism and recounts the battles between vested, competing interests, such as the AMA, independent physicians, corporate employers, labor unions, insurance companies (nonprofit and commercial), and the state and federal governments.  Each of these entities sha

How and where do transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) people find good mental healthcare? And how can psychotherapists and other mental health professionals become competent in this kind of care? Furthermore, what are the most important mental health issues faced by TGNC people? These are some of the questions with which TGNC people grapple regularly, and they motivated Dr. Eric Yarbrough to write his new book, Transgender Mental Health (2018, American Psychiatric Association). In our interview, we discuss what it means to be transgender and gender non-conforming, the importance of understanding the gender spectrum, and what gender-affirming mental health treatment looks like. We also address practical questions about how to find good care and what clinicians need to know in order to practice competently. This long-awaited book furthers our understanding about key issues for TGNC people and is a must-read for anyone, client or therapist, engaged with TGNC mental healthcare. Eric Yarbrough is Director

Early studies of the functions of the human brain used a simple method: wait for misfortune to strike—strokes, seizures, infectious diseases, lobotomies, horrendous accidents-and see how the victim coped. In many cases survival was miraculous, and observers could only marvel at the transformations that took place afterward, altering victims’ personalities. An injury to one section can leave a person unable to recognize loved ones; some brain trauma can even make you a pathological gambler, pedophile, or liar. But the book The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery (Back Bay Books, 2015) explains how a few scientists realized that these injuries were an opportunity for studying brain function at its extremes. With lucid explanations and incisive wit, Sam Kean explains the brain’s secret passageways while recounting forgotten stories of common people whose struggles, resiliency, and deep humanity made modern neur

How do we create meaning after the genome? Such a profound question is at the center of the recently published book by Jenny Reardon, The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Knowledge and Justice after the Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Drawing upon nearly a hundred interviews including with genetic scientists, social scientists, activists, lawyers and policy makers, Reardon constructs an engaging story detailing accounts of genomic projects from several field sites around the globe. Beyond her ethnographic accounts, Reardon engages with historical antecedents, such as the infamous Tuskegee study and the following Belmont Report, as well as philosophical discussions and insights from the likes of Hannah Arendt and Jean François Lyotard. The result is a reconsideration of genomics in a society vexed by inequality, and a push toward matters of science and justice. Following the completion of the Human Genome Project, many subsequent genomic related projects (such as the Human Genome Diversity Project, G

Most people say they would like to die quietly at home. But overly aggressive medical advice, coupled with an unrealistic sense of invincibility or overconfidence in our health-care system, results in the majority of elderly patients misguidedly dying in institutions. Many undergo painful procedures instead of having the better and more peaceful death they deserve. At Peace: Choosing a Good Death After a Long Life (Grand Central Life & Style, 2018) outlines specific active and passive steps that older patients and their health-care proxies can take to ensure loved ones live their last days comfortably at home and/or in hospice when further aggressive care is inappropriate. Through Dr. Samuel Harrington’s own experience with the aging and deaths of his parents and of working with patients, he describes the terminal patterns of the six most common chronic diseases; how to recognize a terminal diagnosis even when the doctor is not clear about it; how to have the hard conversation about end-of-life wish

Earlier this year, Jamila Michener visited the podcast to talk about her new book, Fragmented Democracy, about Medicaid and the state-based structure that results in very different experiences of Medicaid recipients from state to state. We return to the topic of health care this week. Jonathan Engel has recently written Unaffordable: American Healthcare from Johnson to Trump (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018). Engel is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College and an adjunct professor of health policy and management at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. In Unaffordable, we read a fifty-year history of the adoption of a variety of health care programs, from Medicare to Obamacare. Engel unravels the implications of health policy design for the delivery of services. He pays particular attention to the ways that health policy design have resulted in rising health care costs and the unaffordability of health care for many Americans. This podcast was hosted by Heath Br

Susan M. Squier’s book, Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor (Duke University Press, 2017)  is about development— biological and ecological. It explores how the media (paintings, films, graphics) that experts have created to understand development and to communicate without verbal language has shaped—and continues to affect—the worlds in which we live. Squier’s book takes its title from a set of images from the embryologist C.H. Waddington, all meant to demonstrate his theory of how life developed—as a dynamic process emerging within multiple scales of time and space. The first Epigenetic Landscape was, literally, a landscape painting—thick and confounding—that Waddington commissioned from the artist John Piper. Over the next twenty years, Waddington created two additional images that suggested a less contextual, more individually focused conception of development. In her creative and persuasive book, Susan Squier follows iterations of the Epigenetic Landscape to spotlight moments of contingency in the

For thousands of years the human heart remained the deepest of mysteries; both home to the soul and an organ too complex to touch, let alone operate on. Then, in the late nineteenth century, medics began going where no one had dared go before. The following decades saw the mysteries of the heart exposed, thanks to pioneering surgeons, brave patients and even sacrificial dogs. In eleven landmark operations, Thomas Morris tells us stories of triumph, reckless bravery, swaggering arrogance, jealousy and rivalry, and incredible ingenuity: the trail-blazing blue baby procedure that transformed wheezing infants into pink, healthy children; the first human heart transplant, which made headline news around the globe. And yet the heart still feels sacred: just before the operation to fit one of the first artificial hearts, the patients wife asked the surgeon if he would still be able to love her. The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations (Thomas Dunne Books, 2018) gives us a view over the su

In her new book, Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease (Bloomsbury, 2017), Carolyn Day tracks the relationship between dress, appearance, and tuberculosis in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Blending the histories of medicine and fashion, she charts multiple and often contested understandings of consumption and its socio-cultural significance. Day’s focus on experiences of upper- and middle-class women highlights gendered critiques of fashionable activities that allegedly led to the disease: riding, dancing, “impractical” dress. Emerging alongside these criticisms was the belief that some sufferers acquired desirable characteristics of feminine beauty—what Day terms an “aesthetics of consumption”—via the incurable illness. Complemented by rich case studies and illustrations, Consumptive Chic reveals the entangled history of ill health and beauty, as eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century aesthetics took an especially lethal turn.

In this highly engaging, thoroughly persuasive book, Dr. Halee Fischer-Wright presents a unique prescription for fixing America’s health care woes, based on her thirty years of experience as a physician and industry leader. The problem, Fischer-Wright asserts, is that we have lost our focus on strengthening the one thing that has always been at the heart of effective health care: namely, strong relationships between patients and physicians, informed by smart science and enabled by good business, that create the trust necessary to achieve the outcomes we all want. Drawing from personal stories and examples from popular culture, supported by scientific studies and rock-solid logic, Back to Balance: The Art, Science, and Business of Medicine (Disruption Books, 2017) shows how the business and science of medicine are combining to strangle the creative, compassionate, human side of medicine—what Dr. Fischer-Wright calls the “art of medicine.” She then details the three questions necessary t

As physicians, we cannot image or measure it, we can only try to locate within the lives and (sometimes) bodies of our patients. In All in Your Head: Making Sense of Pediatric Pain (University of California Press, 2015), an ethnography of a pediatric pain clinic, anthropologist Mara Buchbinder shows how continuing to treat pain as individual and isolated would not only be a mistake, it would miss how pain is actually experienced, treated and even generated. While the chronic pain of patients is hard to pin down, locate, diagnose and treat, it is most definitely not all in ones head, it is multifaceted and socially distributed. In many ways, the elusiveness of chronic pain syndromes makes it even more slippery, more likely to exceed the boundaries of private experience. To start, Buchbinder shows us how pain practitioners use metaphors to create a common language and experience of pain. Images of computer wiring and “sticky brains” are not just fanciful flourishes to engage the children with pain;

Eugenic sterilization is usually associated with Nazi horrors before and during World War II. But, as Dr. Molly Ladd-Taylor reminds us, it was also practiced in the United States. In her new book Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), Ladd-Taylor examines a state-run sterilization program in Minnesota and reveals the everyday politics of eugenic sterilization in twentieth-century America. She demonstrates that eugenic sterilization in practice was dictated not only by long-standing attitudes toward poverty, disability, and gender, but also by financial and fiscal policies geared at managing the cost of public assistance and welfare.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The biggest problem in American health care is us. Do you know how to tell good health care from bad health care? Guess again. As patients, we wrongly assume the best care is dependent mainly on the newest medications, the most complex treatments, and the smartest doctors. But Americans look for healthcare solutions in the wrong places. For example, hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved each year if doctors reduced common errors and maximized preventive medicine. For Dr. Robert Pearl, these kinds of mistakes are a matter of professional importance, but also personal significance: he lost his own father due in part to poor communication and treatment planning by doctors. And consumers make costly mistakes too: we demand modern information technology from our banks, airlines, and retailers, but we passively accept last century’s technology in our health care. Solving the challenges of health care starts with understanding these problems. Mistreated: Why We Think Were Getting Good Health Care and W

A disease cannot be fully understood unless considered in its environmental context. That conviction drives Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteeth-Century New Orleans (LSU Press, 2017) by historian Urmi Engineer Willoughby. Much more than a history of mosquitoes and scientists, the book attends to ecology, economy, and culture to explore how yellow fever arrived in the Gulf South, why yellow fever epidemics became commonplace in the Crescent City, why they finally abated, and how residents made sense of the disease. Willoughby finds answers in landscapes: the contours of sugarcane plantations, the sprawl of a city brimming with global capital, the severed connections of a military occupation, the new rural railroad network of the postbellum South, the urban zones of public health interventions, and the massive plantations and infrastructure that followed imperial expansion across the hemisphere. Within these places, the notions of racial, ethnic, and geographic otherness permeating theories about suscep

A leading doctor offers answers on the one of the most urgent questions of our time: How do we prevent the next global pandemic? The 2014 Ebola epidemic in Liberia terrified the world―and revealed how unprepared we are for the next outbreak of an infectious disease. Somewhere in nature, a killer virus is boiling up in the bloodstream of a bird, bat, monkey, or pig, preparing to jump to a human being. This not-yet-detected germ has the potential to wipe out millions of lives over a matter of weeks or months. That risk makes the threat posed by ISIS, a ground war, a massive climate event, or even the dropping of a nuclear bomb on a major city pale in comparison. In The End of Epidemics: The Looming Threat to Humanity and How to Stop It (St. Martin’s Press, 2018), Harvard Medical School faculty member and Chair of the Global Health Council Dr. Jonathan D. Quick examines the eradication of smallpox and devastating effects of influenza, AIDS, SARS, and Ebola. Analyzing local and global efforts to contain the

Medicaid provides health care for around 1 in 5 Americans. Despite the large number served, the programs administration by state and local governments means very different things in different places. The geography of federalism matters a lot for Medicaid. But unlike some other large social welfare programs, Medicaid seems to reduce rather than increase political participation, resulting in a population of people stigmatized by the program itself and afforded less political representation. Such is a snippet of the argument made by Jamila Michener in her fascinating new book, Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Michener is assistant professor of political science at Cornell University. Through extensive quantitative and qualitative research, Michener spotlights the people of Medicaid, their awareness of the inequalities that exist across states and localities, and how some are mobilizing to better represent the Medicaid community. What she finds i

Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment (Notting Hill Editions, 2017) is a fascinating account by one of the world’s leading and most decorated neurologists of the profound influence of William Burroughs on his medical career. Dr. Andrew Lees relates how Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch and troubled drug addict, inspired him to discover a ground-breaking treatment for Parkinson’s Disease, and learns how to use the deductive reasoning of Sherlock Holmes to diagnose patients. Lees follows Burroughs into the rainforest and under the influence of yage (ayahuasca) gains insights that encourage him to pursue new lines of pharmacological research and explore new forms of science. Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com.Learn more a