Health care is a deeply personal matter. Several books published in the last year or so stand out for their enlightening, entertaining and often personal stories on the health and science front.
This is hardly an exhaustive list of all the worthy titles. But in case you missed them, here are six health books you might consider cracking open for yourself or giving to a loved one.
“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot
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(Crown; 369 pages; $26 hardcover)
There’s something for nearly every kind of reader in this story that began when a poor black woman sought treatment for cervical cancer in 1951 and a doctor in Baltimore took a tissue sample without her consent. The practice wasn’t uncommon at the time, but Lacks’ sturdy “HeLa” cells proved to be most uncommon.
After she died, scientists were able to use her cell line to develop a raft of new therapies including the polio vaccine, and the profitable business of human biological materials was born. Despite her enormous contribution to medical science, Lacks’ descendants were unable to afford health insurance, and they suffered two decades before learning the truth. Skloot’s patience in winning the family’s trust pays off and she lets Lacks’ daughter Deborah emerge as a poignant protagonist, weaving a moving family portrait into a cautionary tale about health care injustice.
“The Healing of America” by T. R. Reid
(Penguin Press; 288 pages; $16 paperback)
A journalist goes on a self-described “medical pilgrimage” from India to Germany to compare wealthy countries’ health systems through the prism of his aching shoulder. Reid is a particularly engaged patient as he collects medical advice from doctors and other culturally-specific health care practitioners aiming to help him past the pain of an old injury. But he’s just as interested in getting answers as to why the industrialized world’s health systems evolved as they did and why the U.S. outspends them all while leaving 50 million people uninsured and failing to get better health results for its money.
With humor, Reid reminds readers that no health system is perfect. But he trains his eye on Switzerland and Taiwan as examples of similar free-market democracies that found the political will to cover nearly everyone.
“The Emperor of All Maladies” by Siddhartha Mukherjee
(Scribner; 572 pages; $30 hardcover)
For all the talk and news about cancer, it seems to exist in a world that has moved past basic questions about its scientific and social history. Not so on Mukherjee’s watch. In a comprehensive biography of cancer, he introduces a cast of characters, including Sidney Farber and others with familiar names that grace cancer wards, and describes their early trials and errors that led to advances in cancer treatment. But a victory lap is out of the question. The author wants to know how scientists’ shifting understanding and treatment of this disease can be used to predict its future, and his descriptions of patients’ cases unfold with humane elegance. He uses the tale of the ancient Persian queen Atossa, who asked a slave to cut off her cancer-ridden breast, to orient readers on a treatment time line that extends to the present.
“The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande
(Metropolitan Books; 209 pages; $24.50 hardcover)
Even the most highly skilled and trained among us is prone to forgetting crucial steps or neglecting to ask critical questions when the pressure is on. So says Gawande, a New Yorker writer and surgeon at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who takes readers on a tour of how different professions and skilled trades manage the growing complexity of their tasks. By studying the ways of people such as successful skyscraper-builders, chefs in top-notch restaurants and institutional investors, he draws parallels to how U.S. health care teams can improve their performance and reduce deadly medical errors with the use of checklists. With wit and gravitas, Gawande lends new urgency to an old idea.
“Designated Fat Girl” by Jennifer Joyner
(skirt!; 264 pages; $16.95 paperback)
At her heaviest, Jennifer Joyner weighed 336 pounds. She suffered from uncontrolled diabetes, high blood pressure and had given birth three weeks early to a 12-pound baby. By this point in her life — at age 34 — she understood her relationship with food was destructive. To curb her obsessive eating, she underwent gastric bypass surgery. The procedure left her feverish, nauseous and in excruciating pain from an abscess that complicated her recovery. “By having the gastric bypass I took away my physical ability to abuse food,” she said about her life. “That doesn’t mean that I stopped my desire to self-sabotage. I’m still struggling with it. But at least now I know what’s going on there, and I can keep my eye on it.”
McClatchy/Tribune news contributed to this report distributed by Tribune Media Services