Main description:

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 gap-especially 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 with-depression and high blood pressure, arthritis and diabetes-Dr. 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.

Contents:

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: Chronic Pain
2: Common Conditions: The Gap Between Knowledge and Preference
3: Poverty
4: Depression
5: High Blood Pressure: Where is the Limit?
6: Diabetes - Sailing the Uncertain A1C
7: Arthritis: Bred in the Bone
8: Surgery
9: How Good Are Guidelines?
10: Is Half of All Research Wrong?
11: Avoiding False Certainty
12: Revisiting the Biomedical Paradigm
Bibliography