Health care, perpetually in the forefront of Americans’ minds, is now on the tip of our lips. Fixing our current system tops President Obama’s to-do list, but as the details of reform are debated on Capitol Hill, in the media and around the dinner table, a Quinnipiac poll released August 5 found that 52% of Americans disapprove of the way the president is handling health care, while 39% approved. As we await details on the plan that will likely reach a vote this fall, we’re left with the cold, hard facts.
“During the past year, health care has gone from being a public issue to a personal crisis,” says Caroline Sutton, editor-in-chief of Hudson Street Press. Sutton is one of many editors and publishing executives who are pushing new books that address the current state of health care, and which offer a combination of both big-picture ideas for reform—and in some cases, revolution—and concrete, actionable advice for navigating the realities of the current system.
“Readers want tactics and strategies on a practical level, in terms of getting better care for themselves personally,” says Broadway Books publisher Diane Salvatore. “But they also want to be part of any advocacy movement for improvement of health care, and they want to know who the movers and shakers are who can make this happen.”
A Cure for What Ails?
In September, Hudson Street Press will publish Dr. Andrew Weil’s Why Our Health Matters, which Sutton calls Weil’s “most important book to date.” In a concise, 288-page volume, the five-time New York Times—bestselling author shows “how we have become embroiled in a completely dysfunctional situation,” says Sutton, “and provides a solution that will not only make health care affordable, but will also put each one of us on the road to optimal health.” Weil lays out three myths that have brought the American system to this point and argues for a new model of health promotion and disease prevention. “You really feel after you’ve read the book that someone’s taken you by the collar and shaken you,” says Sutton. “It’s that powerful.”
After 30 years in private practice in internal medicine, Len Saputo reacted to the flaws he saw in the system by founding the nonprofit educational foundation the Health Medicine Forum. There he began crafting his vision for a medical system focused on holism, prevention and service; those ideas are now presented in A Return to Healing from Origin Press. Recently Saputo and his coauthor, Origin Press publisher Byron Belitsos, spent two weeks on Capitol Hill, lobbying on behalf of the ideas in the book. “One could sense, with each meeting we had, how gridlocked Congress is with special interests,” says Belitsos. “How it has wholesale adopted the industry point of view on the issues.” While Saputo is also pessimistic about current reform efforts—“There are so many politics involved, we can’t get to the issues,” he says—he is optimistic about long-term possibilities: “Things have gotten so bad that we’ve actually come out of our coma, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll be inspired enough to bring America to a place where the social transformation is real.”
At Princeton University Press, Chuck Myers, executive editor and group publisher, social sciences, says readers are looking for new perspectives on the complicated policy issue that “correctly and objectively diagnose the problem, identify solutions and give them new arguments that will move this critical debate forward.” Coming next month is Daniel Callahan’s Taming the Beloved Beast: How Medical Technology Costs Are Destroying Our Health Care System.
“The cost problem scares everyone, but politicians don’t want to go near it,” says Callahan, a senior research scholar and president emeritus at the Hastings Center, a research institution dedicated to bioethics and the public interest. “Technology and the idea of medical progress [are] part of American culture—the public loves it, and doctors are trained to use it,” he says. “It turns out we’re fighting biology, and it always costs more and more money to do it.” In Taming the Beloved Beast, which considers both the economics and the ethics involved in the utilization—or the refusal—of the latest innovations, Callahan recommends a new attitude toward the “idea of a full life,” and proposes that we reconsider the use of expensive high-tech medicine, especially among elderly or terminally ill patients.
In The Life You Save: Nine Steps to Finding the Best Medical Care—and Avoiding the Worst (Da Capo), medical malpractice attorney and patient advocate Patrick Malone urges readers to take a hard look at the realities of today’s treatment options and aims to empower them to be their own best advocates. “I looked at what was out there and saw a lot of scandal-mongering books that didn’t say much about what people can do in their own lives to protect themselves, and other, feel-good kinds of books about negotiating the medical care system that didn’t talk about [its] brokenness and fragmentation,” says Malone. “I bring together a lot of threads and say: look, we have a very alarming situation here—there are things you can do to protect yourself from harm.” The book includes strategies for obtaining—and understanding—your own medical records, finding the best primary-care physician and avoiding the major hazards of hospitals.
“We all want to believe that we will enter the hospital and swiftly recover,” says Martine Ehrenclou, author of Lemon Grove Press’s Critical Conditions, which teaches readers how to advocate for hospitalized loved ones. “That simply isn’t reality anymore because of the drastic nursing shortage, the developing physician shortage, patient overload for both nurses and physicians, and because of the financial duress many hospitals are facing.” Ehrenclou says that sales of the book are continuing to build: “People who have had experience with hospital stays are in a vacuum—there is so little support for them,” she says. “When they hear about my book, it’s as if they have finally found someone who gets it and can tell them what to do in very simple, concrete steps.”
Scrutinizing the Salves
In addition to crippling costs and chaotic hospitals, many argue that Americans’ dysfunctional relationship with prescription drugs has long contributed to the health-care crisis, resulting in doctors who overprescribe and a population that is entirely overdependent. Square One president Rudy Shur cites the tabloid frenzy surrounding Michael Jackson’s death as an illumination on the excessive use of pharmaceuticals in the U.S. “There is a kind of madness in consumer health right now,” says Shur. “However, my feeling is that people are starting to wake up to the dangers of popping pills—and are opting for more informed choices when it comes to their health.” End Your Addiction Now: The Proven Nutritional Supplement Program That Can Set You Free by Charles Gant, M.D., and Greg Lewis offers a biochemical recovery program.
Last fall, Addicus Books released the third edition of its top-selling Overcoming Prescription Drug Addiction, originally written in 1995 by Addicus publisher Rod Colvin, who lost his brother to prescription drug addiction. “Today, because of Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson, it’s come to the attention of the public much more, but the problem is ravaging families across the nation,” says Colvin, noting that overdoses of prescription drugs is now one of the leading causes of accidental death in the U.S., especially among people ages 45 to 54. “The problem with addiction is that there’s a great deal of shame that keeps people from getting help. Life doesn’t come with a training manual.” The book also has a companion Web site, prescriptiondrugaddiction.com, that provides online resources, message boards and recovery stories.
This month McGraw-Hill rolls out the updated fourth edition of Prescription Alternatives: Hundreds of Safe, Natural, Prescription-Free Remedies to Restore and Maintain Your Health. Authors Earl Mindell and Virginia Hopkins wrote this book, in part, because they believe prescription drugs can endanger people’s health, says editor Emily Carleton. “When people can’t even afford to fill their prescriptions or can only take half, you have danger as soon as you diverge from the way these drugs are prescribed,” she says. “We’re hoping that with the current economic situation and headlines about the dangers of prescription drugs, the book will become visible to another kind of reader, who’s interested in living healthy and exercising their own preventative medicine.” This educated consumer might also be interested in Trick or Treatment by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, M.D., a trade paperback coming from Norton in October. The book examines 30 popular treatments—from acupuncture to aromatherapy—for their benefits and potential drawbacks.
First-Person Medicine
“The national debate about the availability of health care evokes the passions and anxieties we all have when facing medical maladies,” says Broadway Books executive editor Charlie Conrad. “The best medical narratives tap into those same emotions.” Conrad offers as an example Dr. Lisa Sanders’s Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis, in which Sanders, an internist who writes the New York Times Magazine’s Diagnosis column, illustrates the diagnostic process through a series of real-life medical cases. Says Broadway’s Salvatore: “These are not just fascinating mini-mysteries (of the sort that have made so many TV hospital dramas hits), they give readers practical insight into getting better care from their own docs.”
Grand Central executive editor Diana Baroni says she’s also noticed a trend in narrative nonfiction books by doctors. “In the vein of Atul Gawande and Jerome Groopman,” she says, GCP is publishing Cheating Death: The Doctors and Medical Miracles That Are Saving Lives Against All Odds by Sanjay Gupta, M.D., Time columnist and chief medical correspondent for CNN. Through personal stories, Gupta illustrates how advances in technology and medicine have affected the line between life and death. “Books like these are not prescriptive per se,” says Baroni, “but they do offer important information for readers, as well as extremely involving stories of the advancement of medical science.”
When noted pediatrician William Sears was diagnosed with colon cancer 12 years ago, he knew he had to reform his junk food—eating ways and commit to a healthy lifestyle. Now cancer-free after treatment, Sears has documented his program, covering age-related changes and offering lifestyle, exercise and nutrition tweaks that will strengthen and lengthen one’s life. The product of more than a decade of work, Prime-Time Health is Sears’s first book to directly address baby boomers. “People coming to this book are the ones who bought Sears’s baby book when it first came out,” says Little, Brown executive editor Tracy Behar. “The timing really works—he believes the health-care system is so broken that people need to take charge of their own health.”
“Who hasn’t had some symptom and typed it into a Google search—and who hasn’t been terrified by the undigested information that came back?” asks Workman editor-in-chief Susan Bolotin. “That’s why it’s more important than ever to publish books that put health-minded consumers in the hands of authors with impeccable credentials, a passion for their subjects and an ability to separate useful and honest information from stuff that’s biased or unsubstantiated or just plain silly... our health is too important to be treated like a fad.” She says that Pat Wingert and Barbara Kantrowitz’s The Menopause Book, which Workman will publish next month, is strong because the authors write from “experience—both personal and professional.”
Also targeted to middle-aged women is Ask Dr. Marie, from Globe Pequot’s new GPP Life imprint, in which ABC News medical contributor Dr. Marie Savard covers a range of issues, from chronic illness and hormone changes to weight gain and body image. Says Globe Pequot publicist Bob Sembiante, “She starts out with a great introduction: 'Relax, step into my office, let me take my white coat off, and let’s have a conversation about your health.’ The way she likes to prepare her questions is to say, 'What would you ask if your best friend was your physician?’ ”
Demystifying Chronic Disease
As the incidence of diabetes swells in the U.S. (about 24 million Americans are living with the chronic disease; another 57 million have prediabetic conditions), so, too, do the questions about managing and living well with the illness. Bestselling author Bob Greene, an exercise physiologist and certified personal trainer whose Oprah Winfrey—championed Best Life Diet was rated number one by Consumer Reports in June 2007, has teamed up with dietitian Janis Jibrin and endocrinologist John J. Merendino Jr., M.D., to write The Best Life Guide to Managing Diabetes and Pre-Diabetes (Simon & Schuster). The book was written to address a need that’s become more and more apparent on Greene’s Web site, says editor Sydney Miner: “People were saying that they loved the diet but that they had diabetes,” she says. “This book is the basic Best Life Diet plan specifically adapted for people with those issues.”
The American Diabetes Association offers several new titles, including What Do I Eat Now? A Step-by-Step Guide to Eating Right with Diabetes, an October release by Patti B. Geil and Tami A. Ross. Billed as “the DIY approach to a diabetes diet,” each chapter offers meal plans and recipes and explains a vital concept of diabetes nutrition in easy-to-understand language. Also out in October is The American Diabetes Association Guide to Herbs and Nutritional Supplements: What You Need to Know from Aloe to Zinc, in which Laura Shane-McWhorter provides pertinent information about why these popular herbs and nutritional supplements are used and how they affect prescription drugs. Many supplements, she notes, can intensify or interfere with prescribed medications for diabetes.
This past summer, Da Capo’s Lifelong Books imprint released two diabetes-related titles with unique angles to help readers demystify their conditions. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there,” says senior editor Renee Sedliar. “It’s essential that people know what [the] myths are, because... the truths they obscure could be extremely beneficial to a patient’s care and treatment.” Earlier this month Da Capo published 50 Diabetes Myths That Can Ruin Your Life—and the 50 Diabetes Truths That Can Save It by Riva Greenberg, who’s lived with the condition for more than 30 years.
Da Capo’s Diabetes? No Problema: The Latino’s Guide to Living Well with Diabetes by Sheri R. Colberg and Leonel Villa-Caballero, M.D., is aimed at the approximately 2.5 million Latino-American adults who have the condition. “The book tackles issues specific to Latinos,” says Sedliar, “such as how being a part of the Latino community may affect the achievement of successful diabetes control, and barriers to Latinos’ diabetes care and education, including cultural and socioeconomic nuances.”
And while medical advances and awareness campaigns have vastly improved the prognosis for many types of cancer, few people are prepared to handle the shock of a cancer diagnosis. New Harbinger’s third edition of The Chemotherapy Survival Guide by oncology nurses Judith McKay and Tamara Schacher addresses common fears as well as side effects that doctors don’t commonly discuss with patients, such as anxiety, sexual difficulties and taste changes. “Cancer treatment is changing constantly as new chemotherapy medications and drug regimens are developed—this book is the most up-to-date one on the market,” says senior editor Jess Beebe. “The authors write in a straightforward, truly compassionate style, conveying a tremendous amount of practical information while at the same time reassuring the reader.”
“The huge success of Elizabeth Edwards’s books also speaks to the need for books that deal with health issues from an emotional and spiritual point of view,” says Broadway’s Salvatore. A convergence of unique voices around a common theme is found in Forge’s September offering Perseverance: True Voices of Cancer Survivors. By Carolyn Rubenstein, 24, founder of the nonprofit Carolyn’s Compassionate Children, the book tells the stories of 20 college students who have survived childhood cancer.
As Broadway’s Salvatore says, these books tap into “the communities of consolation when it comes to coping with a serious illness.” It’s an essential angle for anyone struggling with the mysteries of the body and questions related to health. Whether it’s conquering a formidable disease or healing our fragmented system, compassion, creativity and commiseration are each key to survival.
A list of all titles mentioned in this feature can be found here.
