Healthcare – Page 5 – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness

By Scott J. Pearson | June 20, 2023August 13, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

I must begin this review with a confession of my biases. I have had bipolar disorder for 20 years and have learned through hard-fought experience how to control it. I also have progressed through medical school, but do not practice medicine due to side effects of medications for bipolar disorder. For a career, I build software infrastructure that supports the medical research system. I found Andrew Scull’s history of psychiatry enlightening. He clearly explains how…

Healthcare History Science

The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons

By Scott J. Pearson | May 22, 2023May 22, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Research into the human brain comprises an exciting frontier of knowledge today, yet most scientific accounts can dryly bore the average reader. And frankly, a lot of scientists and doctors can benefit from reading narratives of human stories behind scientific discoveries. To fill this gap, Sam Kean chronicles in this book the many functions of the human brain – and of parts of the human brain. He teaches basic neuroscience with the noteworthy interpersonal backstories…

Healthcare HIV/AIDS

HIV Vaccine Awareness Day 2023

By Scott J. Pearson | May 18, 2023May 14, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Today is HIV Vaccine Awareness Day. As those around me have probably picked up on, making an HIV vaccine has become one of my causes. In the quickest vaccine development ever, we made a COVID vaccine in a number of months, but it’s been almost 40 years since AIDS came to light, you say… Why haven’t we developed an effective HIV vaccine when COVID’s was made so quickly? For one, COVID has significantly less mutations.…

Healthcare Science Society

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

By Scott J. Pearson | April 4, 2023April 4, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Pandemics were on global leaders’ agendas before 2020, but since no global catastrophe happened since 1918, most did not prioritize these concerns. I hope that will not happen as much going forward. Preventative work has gained a new life. Bill Gates, co-founder of both Microsoft and the philanthropic Gates Foundation, uses his privileged, bird’s-eye view to organize what work can be done to avoid the “next pandemic.” Though humanity has moved onto other challenges, doing…

Healthcare Science

The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine & the New Human

By Scott J. Pearson | March 4, 2023March 4, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Siddhartha Mukherjee, one of our age’s most brilliant medical writers, is a cancer doctor with research interests in the basic sciences of cell biology and genetics. He is also an engaging writer with a deep knowledge of the history of science. His books, one of which has won a Pulitzer Prize, combine all these crosscurrents to convey a compelling narrative. He’s done it for both genetics and cancer, and here, he hits another home run…

Healthcare HIV/AIDS Psychology

HIV: Issues with Mental Health & Illness

By Scott J. Pearson | February 11, 2023February 11, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

I write this review sixteen years after the publication of this book – a lifetime for rapidly advancing scientific insights. Nonetheless, this book represents an early attempt to understand how to deal with the relationship of HIV infection and severe mental illness (bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or major depressive disorder). This problem was noted early in HIV’s emergence and began to be systemically addressed more in the 1990s. HIV infection rates at the time of publication…

Healthcare HIV/AIDS

HIV & Aging

By Scott J. Pearson | January 15, 2023January 15, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

The discovery of Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART) in the 1990s was a historical game-changer for those infected with HIV. Instead of dying with AIDS four years after diagnosis, patients infected could now live for decades going forward. While certainly a welcome happening, HAART opened up a new set of questions for those affected with HIV along with healthcare providers: How do we handle growing old with HIV? And how does medicine cope with an…

Biography-Memoir Healthcare Science Society

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing & the Future of the Human Race

By Scott J. Pearson | December 14, 2022December 14, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

In our generation, codes comprise some of the most interesting subjects of study. We code computers to do work for us; we also are beginning to decode the genetic code to propel life forward. The discovery of CRISPR promises to allow us to edit the human genome, and Professor Doudna sits among this innovation’s prime discoverers. Along with another female scientist Professor Charpentier, she won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2020. This biography, written…

Healthcare HIV/AIDS

World AIDS Day 2022: A Testimonial

By Scott J. Pearson | December 1, 2022November 30, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

Today, December 1, is World AIDS Day. During my second year of medical school, I remember sitting in on a full day of presentations about AIDS. Gabriel Virella always organized an intricate set of lectures on World AIDS Day each year. That year, researchers had just failed (again) in a major trial of a vaccine. Along with immunology, we learned about social and cultural issues about HIV, the different medicines used to treat it, and…

Biography-Memoir Healthcare HIV/AIDS

Nurses on the Inside: Stories of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic in NYC

By Scott J. Pearson | November 25, 2022November 25, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

Much has changed since HIV/AIDS first started spreading widely in America. Fortunately, we now have better drugs to treat HIV infections. The healthcare system focuses on prevention through PrEP. America is more accepting of homosexuality, though more progress can always be made. Some things remain similar, though. Preventative vaccines are still a hoped-for but not realized dream. The stigma of a diagnosis still exists, but not nearly as badly as it did in the 1980s…