Making Sense of Medicine (eBook)

With many common health conditions—diabetes, arthritis, depression—there is no one right route to effective treatment, and science does not give us one definitive answer. In practical chapters and through real stories, Dr. Zackary Berger shows how to bridge the gap between scientific knowledge, doctors’ recommendations, and patient preferences.

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The more we know about medicine, the more we realize that many health questions have no one true answer. Realizing this, and thinking carefully about how medicine asks patients to treat their conditions, leads us to some questions. How reliable are the guidelines that might form the basis of doctors' advice? Is it wrong, after all, to base an approach to medicine on patients' preferences? And, given that there is often a distance between the treatment a doctor advises and what a patient would like to do, how do we bridge the gapespecially in a health culture of inequality, technical proficiency, and increasing costs? In practical, engaging, narrative-driven chapters about common health conditions that millions of Americans are familiar withdepression and high blood pressure, arthritis and diabetesDr. Zackary Berger of Johns Hopkins demystifies the often bewildering disconnect between patients and doctors and asks us all to think more clearly about how best to protect and cure the human body.