Your Life Depends on It : What You Can Do to Make Better Choices about Your Health

"With a fine combination of humor, compassion and vast knowledge, Talya Miron-Shatz offers clear and useful guidance for the hardest decisions of life.”
-Daniel Kahneman, Nobel award-winning author of Thinking, Fast and Slow

A top expert on decision-making explains why it’s so hard to make good choices—and what you and your doctor can do to make better ones

In recent years, we have gained unprecedented control over choices about our health. But these choices are hard and often full of psychological traps. As a result, we’re liable to misuse medication, fall for pseudoscientific cure-alls, and undergo needless procedures.

In Your Life Depends on It, Talya Miron-Shatz explores the preventable ways we make bad choices about everything from nutrition to medication, from pregnancy to end-of-life care. She reveals how the medical system can set us up for success or failure and maps a model for better doctor-patient relationships.

Full of new insights and actionable guidance, this book is the definitive guide to making good choices when you can’t afford to make a bad one. 

Talya Miron-Shatz, PhD., is a leader in research at the intersection of medicine and behavioral economics. She is professor and founding Director of the Center for Medical Decision Making at Ono Academic College in Israel, senior fellow at the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest in New York, and a visiting researcher at the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge. Miron-Shatz was a post-doctoral researcher at Princeton University, and a lecturer at Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of over 60 academic papers on medical decision making. She is CEO of CureMyWay, an international health consulting firm whose clients include Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and Samsung. She lives in Jerusalem.