Further Reading
These works from highly qualified physicians, researchers, and award winning journalists are included here because they were helpful to me in becoming medically wise. Each author is a man or woman of courage for telling the truth as they see it. They have my gratitude for helping all of us be wise consumers of medical care.
Overdo$ed America
The Broken Promise of American Medicine.
John Abramson, MD.
New York: Harper Perennial, 2005
Dr. Abramson, on the clinical faculty of Harvard Medical School, is so incensed that he quit his successful practice to write this book.
Critical Condition
How Health Care in America Became Big Business and Bad Medicine.
Donald L. Barlett and James B Steele.
New York: Broadway Books, 2004
Two Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists follow the money and tell sobering stories.
The Great American Healthcare Scam
How Kickback, Collusion and Propaganda Have Exploded Healthcare Costs in the United States.
David Belk, MD and Paul Belk, PhD.
ebook.com.
These two brothers got way into how medical pricing works and self-published many stories of practices that would have provoked legislation long ago in any other consumer industry.
How We Do Harm
A Doctor Breaks Ranks about Being Sick in America.
Otis Webb Brawley, MD.
New York: St Martin’s Press, 2011
This is a gem by the former chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society who pulls back the curtain on overtreatment and unproven treatments.
America’s Bitter Pill.
Money, Politics, Backroom Deals and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System.
Steven Brill
New York: Random House, 2015
The founder of the Yale Journalism Initiative gives valuable insights into why the American medical system is so broken.
The China Study
Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health.
Colin Campbell, PhD and Thomas M. Campbell II.
Dallas: Benelli Books, 2004
This is a weighty classic by two Cornell scientists who show how American nutritionists and American medicine just don’t get it on diet.
Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime
How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare.
Peter C Gotzsche.
Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2013
Passionate Danish researcher sees drug companies as knowing accomplices to millions of deaths.
The Last Well Person
How to Stay Well Despite the Health-Care System.
Nortin M Hadler, MD.
Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2004
Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill Medical School writes brilliantly and scathingly of the overtreatment epidemic.
Fatal Care
Survive in the US Health System.
Sanjaya Kumar, MD.
Minneapolis, MN: IGI Press, 2008
Chilling hospital stories from the president and chief medical officer for Quantros, Inc. and a highly respected hospital consultant.
The Danger within Us
America’s Untested, Unregulated Medical Device Industry and One Man’s Battle to Survive It.
Jeanne Lenzer.
New York: Little Brown and Co., 2017
Award-winning journalist exposes the sometimes unprincipled greed of the medical devices industry.
Code Blue
Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex.
Mike Magee, MD.
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2019
His wife told him to write an important book, and he did!
The Price We Pay
What Broke American Health Care—And How to Fix it.
Martin Makary, MD.
New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019
This surgeon and professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins is probably the most effective medical reformer in America today.
Mistreated
Why We Think We’re Getting Good Health Care and Why We’re Usually Wrong.
Robert Pearl, MD.
New York: Perseus Books, 2017
The CEO of Permanente Medical is one of the best writers today on the importance of wisdom by medical consumers.
An American Sickness
How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back.
Elisabeth Rosenthal.
New York: Penguin Books, 2017
This Harvard Medical School grad and New York Times reporter talks about the capture of a formerly noble enterprise.
Deep Medicine.
How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again.
Eric Topol.
New York: Basic Books, 2019
This world-renowned cardiologist and brainy tech person also wrote The Creative Destruction of Medicine.
Internal Bleeding
The Truth behind America’s Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes.
Robert M. Wachter, MD, and Kaveh G. Shojania, MD.
New York: Rugged Land LLC, 2004
Dr. Wachter, professor of medicine at UCSF, tells dozens of outrageous hospital-based incompetence stories as he makes his case.
Over-Diagnosed
Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health.
H. Gilbert Welch, MD, Lisa M Schwartz, MD, and Steven Woloshin, MD.
Boston: Beacon Press, 2011
Dr. Welch’s is the best book available anywhere to convince you that more testing and more treatment are not always better. I learned a lot from him.
The Great Prostate Hoax
How Big Medicine Hijacked the PSA Test and Caused a Public Health Disaster.
MEDICAL SPECIALTIES
Richard J Ablin, PhD.
New York: St Martin’s Press, 2014
The discoverer of the prostate-specific antigen is horrified by the subsequent unnecessary destruction in men’s lives.
The End of Alzheimer’s
The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline.
Dale E Bredesen, MD.
New York: Penguin Random House, 2017
A world-class neuroscientist and UCLA professor recontextualizes this supposedly incurable and hopeless disease. Brilliant and deserves popularizing to get traction.
Dying Well
Peace and Possibilities at the End of Life.
Ira Byock, MD.
New York: Riverhead Books, 1997
The former president of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine nails it on how American medicine prevents us from dying well.
Malignant
How Bad Policy and Bad Evidence Harm People with Cancer.
Vinayak Prasad, MD, MPH.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020
Dr. Prasad convincingly explains how we incentivize the pursuit of harmful, marginal, or unproven therapies in cancer.
Crooked
Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery.
Cathryn Jakobson Ramin.
New York: HarperCollins, 2017
Intrepid investigative journalist and back sufferer herself brilliantly shows what works and doesn’t for the most common complaint in medicine. A gem.
Reverse Heart Disease Now
Stephen T. Sinatra, MD, FACC.
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2007
Former top interventional cardiologist figures out that it’s all about inflammation, not about cholesterol. Brilliant, courageous, fascinating.
Should I Be Tested for Cancer?
H. Gilbert Welch, MD, MPH.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004
Former Dartmouth Medical School professor exposes the honest dilemmas and downsides of mass screening—for those wise enough to listen.
The Emperor’s New Drugs
Exploding the Antidepressant Myth.
Irving Kirsch, PhD.
New York: Perseus Books Group, 2010
If this University of Connecticut professor emeritus is right, a multibillion-dollar industry is doing more harm than good.
The Divided Mind
The Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders.
John E Sarno, MD.
New York: Harper Collins, 2006
This dean of back pain gurus has turned his attention to the same principle applicable in all of medicine we are complex creatures being treated mechanistically.
A Sea of Broken Hearts.
John T James, PhD.
Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse, 2007
A grieving father and scientist exposes the weak sides of today’s interventional cardiology. He has helped create an exemplary patient safety movement.
Broken Hearts
The Tangled History of Cardiac Care.
David S Jones.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013
The Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine at Harvard is not happy with the past or current cardiology situation.
A Headache in the Pelvis.
David Wise, PhD and Rodney Anderson, MD.
Occidental, CA: National Center for Pelvic Pain, 2003
Another example of mind-body disease widely overtreated.
Younger Next Year.
POPULAR LEVEL
Chris Crowley and Henry Lodge, MD.
New York: Workman Publishing, 2007
Great, funny summary of achieving a healthy lifestyle from a Harvard grad and a Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons board-certified internist.
Being Mortal
Medicine and What Matters in the End.
Atul Gawande, MD.
New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014
A philosophical masterpiece on life and death and medicine’s shortcomings in confronting them.
Top Screwups Doctors Make and How to Avoid Them.
Joe and Teresa Graedon, PhD.
New York: Three Rivers Press, 2011