Deadly Choices: Coping With Health Risks in Everyday Life

Shows readers how to sift through the barrage of information offered about health in order to make rational health decisions and features discussions of heterosexual transmission of HIV, exercise, weight control, nutrition, smoking, and cancer.

"With each new medical 'discovery,' the consuming public grows increasingly hard-nosed and wary. My own patients," writes physician Harris, who is also a professor of economics at M.I.T., "have grown so skeptical that they reject the latest health pronouncements out of hand. They see the media, the scientific establishment, and the government as creating a standard of perfection that no one can adhere to." His suggestion? They should hone their critical skills, for the problem won't vanish anytime soon: the experts will continue handing out pronouncements, and the consumer will continue to receive and judge them. This book is meant to put some of those pronouncements in perspective, and to encourage readers to to take an active role in assessing them. Harris wisely picks and chooses his health concerns, which include AIDS, cancer, cholesterol and exercise; frames discussions as composite stories, with plot and dialogue, not just as abstract arguments; and peppers his prose with questions, paradoxes and tartly noted frustrations. In other words, he's a realist who wants to be of use but who has no intention of offering quick solutions. This itself can cause some problems, as an issue is thrashed out, sometimes, to the point of exhaustion as much as conclusion. But generally, Harris is an expert mediator, bringing us into confrontation not only with the claims of experts, but also with our own mixed feelings about health and health dogmas.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An uneven but good-humored attempt to lighten the task of making health decisions. Harris (Economics/MIT; Medicine/Harvard Medical School) focuses on six issues: heterosexual behavior and AIDS; exercise; weight control; cholesterol; smoking; and breast cancer. His stated aim isn't simply to impart information--although there's plenty of that here--but to encourage a way of thinking, an approach to decision-making. While noting that the risks of everyday living aren't entirely under one's own control (both genetics and luck play a part), he urges confronting choices boldly, reducing risks intelligently, and being persistent. Harris presents six minidramas, some serious, some comic, in which characters face decisions affecting their health: Will Dinah have unprotected sex with Caleb? Will Steve stay in his aerobics class? Will Eve enroll in a weight-loss program? What will Gideon order for lunch? How can Andrew quit smoking? Will Ruth have a preventive mastectomy? The characters are fictitious, but the author, who also practices medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, bases their concerns on his experience with thousands of patients. He examines their circumstances and analyzes their choices, wise and otherwise. It's clear that collecting information is the first step in making a wise health decision, but less clear is just how one determines what to do-- or not to do--in the face of confusing messages from the media, advertisers, public-health officials, and the scientific establishment. Although he falls short of his objective of teaching an overall approach, the information Harris imparts about the specific issues he raises will facilitate decision- making in those areas. Altogether, much useful advice about handling some of life's major health risks. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

To the lay reader, the published results of medical research often seem confusing, contradictory, even overwhelming. Consider only the evidence presented about cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. Harris (Harvard, MIT) sets out "to decode the messages from the scientific establishment, the media, and the public health officials" on medical research. He presents composite stories drawn from real case histories and examines the consequences of choices made with respect to sex and HIV, exercise, weight control, cholesterol, tobacco, and breast cancer. The analyses tend to become involved. Just as we think we've grasped the issues, we read "but this is just the beginning of the story." The bibliography is impressive, but the text needs editing; it rambles without explaining contradictory research data. For larger public and academic medical collections.
- James Swanton, Albert Einstein Coll. of Medicine, New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.