medicine - Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 & Beyond

By Scott J. Pearson | June 24, 2024June 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Artificial Intelligence is changing the way information is handled worldwide. The advances pose particular opportunities for medicine, where descriptive texts are the norm, research expands knowledge exponentially, and paperwork is a main product. Of course, new dangers uncover themselves, too. Will AI merely exacerbate existing health inequities, or will it provide better quality care for anyone with a smartphone worldwide? These subjects need to be thought through in order to secure positive outcomes. These authors,…

On Being a Scientist: A Guide to Responsible Conduct in Research

By Scott J. Pearson | July 16, 2023October 20, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Ethics in scientific research is an issue appearing periodically in the news… and often not in a good way. Perhaps some ethical lapse has led to a field’s struggles with millions of dollars worth of effort lost. Or perhaps someone falsified results and misled the public. Or governments might exploit research that was supposed to benefit humanity and redirected it to harming people. All these fall under the headline of “Responsible Conduct in Research,” more…

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…

Mentoring

The Mentoring Guide: Helping Mentors & Mentees Succeed

By Scott J. Pearson | November 5, 2022November 5, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

Mentoring relationships are point-blank critical to career development. They’re not just for the school setting but for anyone interested in a growing career. This book, written by three MDs in academic medicine, delineates the principles of mentoring based on research and experiences. It concisely teaches how to be both an effective mentor and an effective mentee (an under-appreciated virtue). Finally, it has a lengthy appendix (around 50 pages) that provides summaries of articles about mentoring,…

Healthcare History

The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine

By Scott J. Pearson | September 12, 2021September 12, 2021 by Scott J. Pearson

There exist few ways to understand something better than understanding its history. Nuanced details make more sense when attached to the historical narrative. Such is certainly the case in medicine, the universal human struggle against death. This book, an edited collection of histories of various aspects of medicine, offers these explanations with clarity and erudition. It offers hard science commingled with human insight – a coupling appropriate for the task of healing. Students of medicine…

Biography-Memoir Healthcare History Research-Education

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

By Scott J. Pearson | November 20, 2020November 20, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

This work will stand as one of the most interesting works in the genre of the history of medicine in our era. Not only does it tell the origin in life of a famous cell line (HELA, an abbreviation of the name Henrietta Lacks, taught about in college biology classes). But it also tells the story of a humble family who was seemingly forgotten by science. Skloot tells the story of Deborah Lacks, Henrietta’s daughter,…

History Software-Technology

Biomedical Computing: Digitizing Life in the United States

By Scott J. Pearson | June 28, 2020June 28, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

Confession: I work in the field of biomedical computing as a software developer. After journeying through a BS in computer science and medical school, I desire to devote much of my life towards advancing this field along with other bookish pursuits. So this book, by its title, caught my interest. November does an excellent job of chronicling the advance of applying computing towards biomedical pursuits. Much of the early advances in computing came at the…

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…