Healthcare – Page 7 – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

A Change of Heart: How the People of Framingham, Massachusetts, Helped Unravel the Mysteries of Cardiovascular Disease

By Scott J. Pearson | November 17, 2020November 17, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

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…

Healthcare History Science

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

By Scott J. Pearson | October 12, 2020October 12, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

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,…

Biography-Memoir Healthcare

The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine

By Scott J. Pearson | September 21, 2020September 22, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

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…

Healthcare Research-Education Science

Cells are the New Cure: The Cutting-Edge Medical Breakthroughs that are Transforming Our Health

By Scott J. Pearson | August 2, 2020August 2, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

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.…

Healthcare Society

Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start – And Why They Don’t Go Away

By Scott J. Pearson | May 9, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

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…

Healthcare

BLS (Basic Life Support) by the American Heart Association

By Scott J. Pearson | May 2, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

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…

Biography-Memoir Healthcare

Fallible: A Memoir of a Young Physician’s Struggle with Mental Illness

By Scott J. Pearson | April 24, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

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…

Healthcare History Science Software-Technology

Life Out of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics

By Scott J. Pearson | March 29, 2020March 29, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

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…

Fiction-Stories Healthcare

Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

By Scott J. Pearson | February 15, 2020February 15, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

This brilliant work, published in 1920s America and winner of a Pulitzer Prize, addresses the state of medical research shortly after the Flexner Report famously shone a path for medical research to progress. It sets forth the classical view of a medical researcher – isolated, dedicated to his research, not interested in people, and essentially living in his lab. And yes, that view is traditionally centered around a researcher being a male in a more-or-less…