I just got off a helpful call with Vanderbilt Medical Center (VUMC) leadership about COVID and the holidays. From a public-health perspective, I feel that I need to pass along the notes that I took. The presenter was Gordon Bernard. He is an Executive Vice President at VUMC and is respected worldwide both as a researcher and as a clinician. He has worked for over forty years as a Critical Care pulmonologist. This information is…
When US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died from complications of high blood pressure in 1945, the medical community sought to discover the nature and causes of heart disease. Thus was born a multi-generational, decades-long research study into people’s health in Framingham, Massachusetts. This study found scientific evidence about heart disease and changed treatment, research, and culture. This book chronicles this history and preserves this inspiring story for future generations. At the time of writing, Levy…
This book, over a decade old, tells the history of one of London’s worst cholera epidemics. It also tells of how John Snow and Henry Whitehead found the cause for the epidemic and transformed how cities managed cholera epidemics and epidemics in general. Knowledge, reason, and data triumphed over ignorance. In his telling, Johnson describes a variety of topics in depth – a telling that informs and inspires modern readers. During the early Victorian era,…
Elizabeth Blackwell, MD, is well known as the first woman doctor in America. Less well known is her sister Emily in becoming a physician. Emily followed Elizabeth’s path through the hardships of initially not receiving a degree despite doing the work. They co-founded a women’s hospital in New York City along with a women’s medical college. Today, around half of all medical students are female. Their careers are the Blackwell sisters’ legacies. Florence Nightingale saw…
Anyone who has had a baby in the social media age knows how difficult successfully traversing the social-media landscape is. Fringe groups are given equal (or maybe even greater) voice compared to established medical voices. As the authors chronicle well, technical and lay experts have their voices intermixed so that the distinction between the two seems somewhat arbitrary. Johnson and Quinlan share that this blurring process started a long time ago but has been amplified…
Paradigm shifts happen in science occasionally, but historically, relatively few professionals make the shift. Usually, new generations of practitioners tend to bring in the change via their educational experiences. This is unfortunate. In this work, Smith and Gomez educate healthcare professionals and the reading public about advances in medical research. They attempt to enlighten us all about what is going to happen next in doctor’s offices. Their focus is on multiple developments around the cell.…
A casual perusal of social media will demonstrate an active debate about vaccines in contemporary society. Many cite (relatively rare) side effects and disregard abundant scientific studies about vaccines’ effectiveness; these people argue that they should have a “choice” over whether to admit a vaccine in their bodies. They do not heed arguments that herd immunity protects the herd better – that eschewing vaccines hurt us all. In this sociological work, Larson addresses how these…
This manual, based off of recommendations from the American Heart Association (AHA), teaches the basics of life support when/if one encounters someone in a life emergency. It intends to reach an audience of healthcare providers. It covers CPR, defibrillator (AED) use, rescue breathing, choking-rescue techniques, and naloxone administration for opioid-associated events. The AHA and Red Cross administer trainings with this material. This is the standard for life-supporting rescue and first aid. They also have a…
As with most memoirs, this saga spans many sectors of life: religious faith (Mormon), an arduous journey (years of medical training), loneliness and solitude (missionary work in the Ukraine), deep, abiding love (a wife and kids), and obstacles (relentless anxiety). Jones relates his struggle with generalized anxiety disorder and in attaining a stable life. This difficulty is amplified by the fact that he undertakes psychologically stressful education to become a physician. The hardships never really…
Upon reading the title of this book, many non-specialists might rightly ask, “What is bioinformatics? And why does it deserve its own history?” For the first question, bioinformatics is the application of computer technology to biological studies, and I hope that reading this review will answer the second question. Many of us were taught hypothesis-driven biology in school – that is, we were taught to ask a well-formed question, perform an experiment, and confirm/deny the…