Marked by solid scholarship, measured criticism, and pithy comments: an informative and highly readable study that makes a...
Cogent analysis of how pharmaceutical drugs are approved, promoted, and prescribed in this country, with some well-considered recommendations for improving the present system.
According to Avorn (Medicine/Harvard Medical School), Americans waste billions of dollars on prescription drugs that are overpriced, poorly prescribed, and improperly taken. He draws on his extensive experience as researcher and physician to explore the relationships between benefits, risks, and the economic impact of prescription drugs. While the FDA comes under scrutiny for its failure to properly assess the risks of such medications as the diet drug Redux and the diabetes drug Rezulin, this is not another FDA-bashing book. Avorn’s picture is bigger. Through case studies, he examines decisions made by the regulatory agencies, pharmaceutical companies, health policymakers, and physicians that reveal faults in the entire system. After examining how benefits and risks are discovered and measured, he turns to the difficult question of how these are balanced against each other when making decisions about a drug’s use. Avorn finds that in the real world, the major source of information about drugs is the promotion departments of pharmaceutical companies. Surrounded by “an almost suffocating plethora of information of very uneven quality,” physicians have not been prepared by their medical education to deal with it. He proposes an educational outreach program based in medical schools that would send academic “detail men” to doctors’ offices just as drug companies do. They would provide neutral, evidence-based assessment of drug choices so that physicians would know which treatments were more better, safer, and more cost-effective. Avorn points to Canada, Australia, and Great Britain as countries whose drug-assessment procedures we can learn from. His final chapters offer concrete, practical ideas for improving the ways in which drugs are evaluated and pertinent information about them is disseminated.
Marked by solid scholarship, measured criticism, and pithy comments: an informative and highly readable study that makes a significant contribution to the ongoing discussion of an important health care issue.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41483-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
BOOK REVIEW
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