New Books In Medicine

If a parent decides not to vaccinate their children, is that an individual choice, or is it a serious threat to the public health? In Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All (Basic Books, 2011), Dr. Paul Offit discusses the very real threats to the public health created by the anti-vaccine movement, both in the U.S. and around the world. In the book, Dr. Offit reviews the history of vaccines, their importance, and the various attempts to discredit them over the past few centuries. One of these efforts, readers will be interested to know, led to the creation of the Raggedy Ann doll. Read all about it, and more, in Dr. Offit’s frightening new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook if you haven’t already.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week New Books in Public Policy interviews Bob Goldberg about his new book Tabloid Medicine: How the Internet Is Being Used to Hijack Medical Science for Fear and Profit (Simon & Schuster, 2010). The book is a look at the way medical science is discussed and played out over the Internet. As Goldberg says on his website, tabloid medicine is “medical reporting or information based on or consisting of Internet material that sensationalizes and exaggerate the dangers of medical technology without describing the benefits.” In the interview, Goldberg talks about both this problem and its implications, from parents refusing to vaccinate their children to suicidal people avoiding antidepressants for fear of overhyped side effects. He also discusses the role of those who seek to foment fear, as well as discredit their opponents, using new media and innuendo regarding inappropriate conflicts of interest. Finally, Bob takes on the New Books in Public Policy signature question, “What policies w

You may not know who John Galsworthy is, but you probably know his work. Who hasn’t seen some production of The Forsyte Saga? Galsworthy was one of the most popular and famous British writers of the early 20th century (the Edwardian Era). He left an enormous body of work, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932. But Galsworthy was also what we might call a “public humanitarian,” that is, he used his high profile and influence in a great, good cause. The focus of his effort was disabled solders returning from World War I. We, of course, are well acquainted with the remarkable destructive power of modern weaponry. Not a week goes by (alas) in which we do not hear about a soldier being wounded by mines, grenades, artillery fire or bombs (often of the “roadside” variety). But we also have come to expect that soldier, no matter how grievously wounded, will receive medical treatment that will stand at least a fighting chance of saving their lives. And indeed, man

In 1980 I left Kansas to go to college in Iowa. A lot of things caught my attention about Iowa, for example, that the people really are very nice. I also noticed that there were a lot of drugs. One of them was “crystal methamphetamine,” or “crystal meth” for short. I’d never heard of it before (which is not surprising), but I quickly learned that, while not as fashionable as coke, it was inexpensive and widely available. Lots of people did it. It made them feel good. I left Iowa in 1984 for California, and with it any thought of crystal meth. “Crank,” however, remained, ever ready to make people feel good when they had nothing much to feel good about. And as Nick Reding explains in Methland. The Death and Life of an American Small Town (Bloomsbury, 2009) America’s midland didn’t have much to feel good about in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Globalization was hammering the industries that had long supported places like little Oelwein, Iowa, t

When you were in college, did you visit the health center? I did, several times. Did you ever wonder why there was a student health center? I didn’t. It seemed like a part of the college scenery, something that had “always” been there. Far from it, as Heather Prescott shows in her fascinating new book Student Bodies. The Influence of Student Health Services in American Society & Medicine (University of Michigan Press, 2007). Believe it or not, many very smart folks used to believe that college could hurt you, especially (though not exclusively) if you were a woman. And it wasn’t just that you could catch a nasty cold. Too much thinking, these folks said, might weaken the body and lead to a decline in fertility. That wouldn’t be good for the “race.” So some forward-thinking people began to consider ways in which the health of America’s sons and daughters might be protected while they studied. The result was a kind of early experiment in universal health care.