An important book that offers rarely heard warnings about the medical profession.
Isager, in this consistently intriguing book, warns that Western medicine is blindly, or perhaps willfully, dismissing symptoms of multisystem illnesses.
The author, a Danish physician, describes the indifferent response of the worldwide medical community to such afflictions as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome and multiple chemical sensitivities. Why do doctors label such illnesses’ symptoms as psychosomatic or even fictitious? Isager suggests that insurance companies would prefer to avoid the enormous costs of treating patients with poorly understood illnesses and that governments would prefer to avoid the social costs they’d have to bear. He argues that the medical establishment has become a “totalitarian system” that’s hostile to the idea of undergoing the “paradigm shift in clinical medicine” that researching such illnesses would require. The author’s anecdotes, which demonstrate modern medicine’s transformation into a “secular cult,” are persuasive; and so, too, are the research findings that raise concerns about health risks from exposure to dental mercury and low-level electromagnetic fields. The author warns that such exposures, combined with other stressors, can cause “mitochondrial declines,” as observed in “fatigue patients.” The book valiantly attempts to explain the chemistry (and even quantum mechanics) of such declines, and this portion will likely be less accessible to lay readers. But the overarching message is clear: There’s vastly more going on with multisystem illnesses than most doctors can, or will, admit. Although Isager acknowledges that his book will leave readers “with many unresolved questions,” he points out that its ultimate purpose is to “incite debate” about a subject treated as “taboo” by medical journals. Isager not only confronts the realities of these illnesses, he also offers hope for those afflicted that there are some physicians who really want to help them.
An important book that offers rarely heard warnings about the medical profession.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491875827
Page Count: 350
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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
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