The Cure For Everything!: Untangling The Twisted Messages About Health Fitness And Happine

In The Cure for Everything! health-law expert Timothy Caulfield exposes the special interests that twist good science about health and fitness to sell us services and products that mostly don’t work.

Want great abs? You won’t get them by using the latest Ab-Flex-Spinner-Thingy. Are you trying to lose ten pounds? Diet books are a waste of trees. Do you rely on healthcare practitioners — either mainstream or alternative — to provide the cure for what ails you? Then beware! Both Big Pharma and naturopathy are powerful twisting forces with products and services to sell.

Caulfield doesn’t just talk the talk. He signs up for circuit training with a Hollywood trainer who cultivates the abs of the stars. With his own Food Advisory Team (FAT) made up of specialists in nutrition and diet, he makes a lifestyle change that really works. (Mainly it involves eating less than he is used to eating. Much less.) And when he embarks on a holiday cruise, dreading motion sickness, he takes along both a homeopathic and pharmaceutical remedy—with surprising results. This is a light-hearted book with a serious theme. Caulfield demonstrates that the truth about being healthy is easy to find (but often hard to do).

 

TIMOTHY CAULFIELD is a Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy, a Professor in the Faculty of Law and the School of Public Health, and Research Director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta. His interdisciplinary research on topics like stem cells, genetics, research ethics, the public representations of science and health policy issues has allowed him to publish over 350 academic articles. He has won numerous academic and writing awards and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Trudeau Foundation and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. He contributes frequently for the popular press and is the author of two national bestsellers: The Cure for Everything: Untangling the Twisted Messages about Health, Fitness and Happiness (Penguin 2012) and Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?: When Celebrity Culture and Science Clash (Penguin 2015). Caulfield also has a strong social media presence and is the host and co-producer of the documentary TV show, A User’s Guide to Cheating Death.