What I Just Read

The book offers a good introduction to functional/integrative-style medicine and the practice of treating the body holistically. It's also a useful guide to understand certain structural problems of standardized Western medicine, in particular its tendency to medicalize/pathologize symptom clusters and treat them with "approved" pharmaceuticals.  The UltraMind Solution  is long and very detailed, but it also boils its central ideas down into simple rules and conceptual frameworks. You'll walk away from this book with a set of relatively simple keys and rules for living a healthier life.  The author also has quite a gift for persuasion. When he asks, rhetorically, "Is depression a Prozac deficiency? Is ADHD a ritalin deficiency?"  these striking meta-questions reveal how conventional Western ("allopathic") medicine often merely pokes around the edges of disease, treating specific symptoms with meds, while not knowing (or even caring, really) about t...

By describing how good hospitals and surgical centers could be , Atul Gawande indirectly--and likely without intending to do so--describes quite a number of ugly truths about how they actually are . The truth is, more likely than not, the surgery team cutting you open isn't a coherent team. They likely don't even know each others' names. Surgeons as a rule generally resist using basic checklist procedures to prevent infection risk and catastrophic errors. In fact, Gawande finds surgeons often offended by the very idea!  Worst of all, the hospitals they work for likely don't even know--and don't want to know--their error rates, complication rates, infection rates and death rates. After all, what's the incentive to track data that might make you look bad?   The idea that it could be as difficult as Gawande finds it to get surgery teams to use basic checklists (something the airline industry has done for generations to produce astoundingly good safety records) is s...

What's beautiful about Thomas More--and rare in this day and age--was his incorruptibility. As a public servant under England's King Henry VIII, he gave up not only his career, but also his life, to defend his ethical beliefs. [1] Would that we had a few more of this type of civil servant today in our government, particularly in certain government agencies regulating healthcare and finance. Utopia uses the device of "telling a story someone else told you" and thus installing a degree or two of separation between you and what your actual opinions actually are. The words are obviously the author's, but the author can just say "it's not really my story, I'm just telling you what someone else said."  The idea, of course, is to have a layer (or two) of plausible deniability about anything that might be questionable to your era's "authorities." Combine this device with satire, and the author can distance himself from any specific opini...