I have finished 4 out of 6 chapters in my history book in three days. My government book is so borning and awful to read that my history book is like a breath of fresh air. I'm remembering that I really liked history the first time I did this college thing. When I said history is like reading a story, a friend said, "Yeah and the government book is like reading an instruction manual." Very insightful and very very true!
So on vacation I read...
1. A Wise Birth by Penny Armstrong, CNM. Insightful and a little depressing. Hospital brthing is so, just, wrong in so many ways. (This coming from someone who wants to help women give birth in hospitals and who has had 3 hospital births herself.) Armstrong highlights particularly that birth is about power and without the power of birth creating a mother we really undercut a woman's ability to effectively mother her little one. The story's that contrasted hospital birth were Armstrong's experiences with the Amish. That culture and community is so vastly different than anything else that it is hard to imagine that the comparison is helpfulbeyond being depressing. I hope I can maintain a sense of wonder and awe about birth and help women tap into the power of it without losing a little part of my soul to the medical machine.
2. How Doctors Think by Jerome Groupman, M.D. A doctor friend of mine recently hosted this guy for grand rounds at his hospital so I got the book from the library. Really really good and readable. Empowering for someone like me who researches stuff and will happily tell the doc what I've found and expect him/her to listen. The book describes various decision making models and how doctors can fall victim to "cognitive errors" while trying to treat a patient. Heavy on case studies, which i love, and also on advice to patients to help your doctor avoid these mistakes. Well balanced between pointing out doctors mistakes without villianizing them and encouraging patients to be respobsible without recommending a trip to medical school before entering the hospital. I really liked it.
3. Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick looks a Disease by Sharon Moalem, Ph.D. This books looks at disease from an evolutionary perspective. What benefit might certain diseases confer that might make them likely to surivive natural selection's process? Interesting perspective on things like diabetes but a speculative too. i don't know anything about this guy except that his book got published so I took a lot of it with a grain of salt. He described on theory of the development of humans that describes us being descended from a "semi-aquatic ape" and uses the efficiency and safety of water birth as supporting evidence. That definitely perked up my ears but the semi-aquatic ape stuff is a little fringy to take too seriously. (And I'm not opposed to long term evolution as a method of species diversification.) He also talks about the possibility of viruses providing huge genetic variability within humans over a short amount of evolutionary time, "infectious design" he called it. Ha ha. I liked the biology and the physiology but I'm very skeptical without some decent resource to back it up.
And two chapters in "An Instruction Manual For Creating Democracy - How to Take an Amazingly Brilliant Governmental System and Describe it in a Way Guaranteed to Make you Fall Asleep".
Herman Melville and My Two Dads
5 years ago
3 comments:
That last book you mention has an intriguing title. Wow! If you start having dreams about what you're absorbing, they will be quite bizarre. If you want to depress your hospital-nurse self even more, go read Ina May's Guide to Childbirth. Perhaps you could be an acute care nurse instead? I'd love to hear the "leaking brain matter stories" - those never get old.
I haven't read Sharon Moalem's book, but I do know that his claims about diabetes contradict what's known about the disease -- that part at least is nonsense (and I understand it's a major part of the book). Also, his support of the "aquatic ape" idea shows he really doesn't check things out much. I've been looking at the evidence surrounding that idea for over a decade now and it doesn't fare well. You can check out my site on that (Aquatic Ape Theory: Sink or Swim?).
Thanks for the insight, J!
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