medical science

No Apparent Distress: A Doctor’s Coming-of-Age on the Front Lines of American Medicine is inspiring, dispiriting, and profoundly informative all at the same time. Author and MD Rachel Pearson tells the story of medicine in America and how it has developed into a skewed system that favors the rich and the white.

Pearson beings her story at the beginning of her own journey into medicine. A former creative writing major and Texas native, Pearson decides to change her career path and pursue a future in medicine. No Apparent Distress catalogues this journey as Pearson attends medical school in Galveston, Texas, a notoriously diverse and poverty ridden area. Volunteering time at a student-run, free clinic, shadowing doctors on procedures she’s only ever read about, Pearson begins to unravel the unethical nature of medical training.

Throughout her training, Pearson is confronted with the reality that she is learning on those who can’t afford to complain or ask for better. She is making mistakes, time and again, as a student and a doctor in training, on patients who don’t have health insurance, who don’t have any other choice but to accept sub-par care at the hands of a learning medical student. Pearson herself comes from a working-class background, and the effects of inadequate, faulty, and often rushed care has affected her family as well. Pearson’s own mother contracted hepatitis-C during an unnecessary blood transfusion after giving birth to her daughter without health insurance.

Pearson has a unique way of weaving her own person experiences into a larger conversation about healthcare, the care of the unhealthy, and the prejudice biases that drive these very American systems.

A beautiful and frightening portrayal of American medicine, No Apparent Distress, is a book so relevant to our current times that anyone can relate. Whether you are the lucky one standing on the side of the insured receiving adequate care, or you’ve experienced the distress of inadequate care, No Apparent Distress will find resonance with you somewhere.

Published by W.W. Norton and company in May of 2017, No Apparent Distress by Rachel Pearson is available for purchase at your local bookstore.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.

Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions is NPR correspondent Richard Harris’ attempt to bring awareness to the very poor science that he sees as dominating the biomedical field today.

While the title suggests a macabre narrative thread, Rigor Mortis is actually a pun on the lack of rigor that is going into the science experiments Harris discusses. Harris provides historical, social, and environmental contexts and stressors for the issues that he brings up, while also providing an overlay of solutions. Harris recognizes the difficulties in implementing his solutions given the various factors mentioned above. However, he nonetheless feels that scientific rigor must improve for science to keep moving forward.

In Rigor Mortis, Harris targets what he sees to be the major roadblocks in doing good science. Among these are the lack of incentive to do science well, the sheer challenge in reproducing studies that have already been conducted, the fact that most studies are done on animals and not humans and studies don’t always account for that, the lack of authentication of cell lines before use, a lack of guidelines for conducting certain types of experiments, and pressures surrounding publishing and funding. And these aren’t even all of the issues that Harris brings to the table.

The reproducibility problem is something that surfaces again and again in Rigor Mortis. As Harris points out from the outset, “there’s little funding and no glory involved in checking someone else’s work.” Not to mention the fact that people who try to do so often have a hard time actually reproducing the experiments. This difficulty can arise because of a lack of information from the original experimenters or social stigma that reproducing someone else’s work is in fact questioning that work instead of checking it.

From creating incentives for reproducing studies to simply sharing data and working collaboratively, Harris provides a host of suggestions for scientists, universities, labs, and journals to encourage the rigor of science and help the field to actually move forward, instead of spin in circles as he feels it so often does.

Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions by Richard Harris was published by Basic Books in April of 2017. You can purchase a copy at your local bookstore today.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.

Centered on Books

Book Reviews, Literary Discussion, and Author Interviews

‘No Apparent Distress’ by Rachel Pearson

‘Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions’