New Books In Public Health

Capitalizing a Cure: How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines (U California Press, 2023) takes readers into the struggle over a medical breakthrough to investigate the power of finance over business, biomedicine, and public health. When curative treatments for hepatitis C launched in 2013, sticker shock over their prices intensified the global debate over access to new medicines. Weav...

For this episode we welcome Dr. Arthur Caplan, who is currently the Drs. William F. and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor and founding head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine in New York City. Dr. Caplan is the author or editor of 35 books and more than 800 papers in peer reviewed journals. His most recent books are Vaccination Ethics and Policy (MIT Press, 2017...

Mark Parrino has been involved with the delivery of health care and treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD) since 1974. As the president of the American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence, Inc. (AATOD), he works with treatment providers across the country to develop and improve treatment protocols. In December 2022, AATOD worked with the National Association of State Alcohol and Dr...

Dr Pierce Salguero sits down with Venerable Soorākkulame Pemaratana, chief abbot at the Pittsburgh Buddhist Center and a scholar of modern Buddhism in Sri Lanka. We talk about his role in adapting Buddhist practices to address social and mental health needs during the Covid-19 pandemic. We also compare Buddhist responses to Covid in Pittsburgh and Sri Lanka. Along the way, we talk about how he bec...

Hannah Zeavin, lecturer in the department of History and member of the executive committees of both the Center for New Media and the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society at University of California, Berkeley, talks about her book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The book tracks the history of teletherapy, which Zeavin defines as...

For many residents of Western nations, COVID-19 was the first time they experienced the effects of an uncontrolled epidemic. This is in part due to a series of little-known regulations that have aimed to protect the global north from epidemic threats for the last two centuries, starting with International Sanitary Conferences in 1851 and culminating in the present with the International Health Reg...

As I slowly settle into 2023 — reflecting on the blur that was 2022 — I can’t help but think about the complex problems (aka big messes!) we face at every turn: from increasingly devastating manifestations of the climate emergency, to the ubiquitous homelessness crisis, to the perplexing challenge of accessing a family physician in prosperous regions such as British Columbia, Canada. At the same t...

Disruption resulting from the proliferation of AI is coming. The authors of the bestselling Prediction Machines describe what you can do to prepare. Banking and finance, pharmaceuticals, automotive, medical technology, retail. Artificial intelligence (AI) has made its way into many industries around the world. But the truth is, it has just begun its odyssey toward cheaper, better, and faster predi...

Why is dental insurance so crummy? Why is pet insurance so expensive? Why does your auto insurer ask for your credit score? The answer to these questions lies in understanding how insurance works. Unlike the market for other goods and services—for instance, a grocer who doesn’t care who buys the store’s broccoli or carrots—insurance providers are more careful in choosing their customers, because s...

The pandemic brought to the fore a group of workers deemed “essential” – frontline healthcare workers, restaurant employees, slaughterhouse workers, and the like – who often faced a difficult choice between risking their health to work or forgoing income that they couldn’t afford to do without. Often, they had to work even though they couldn’t afford health insurance – or health care themselves if...

Catherine Coleman Flowers, activist, author, founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, and MacArthur “genius prize” winner, talks about her book Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. Waste examines the brutal realities of rural sanitation issues, particularly the lack of septic tanks, and how they affect poor, oft...

Social psychiatry was a mid-twentieth-century approach to mental health that stressed the prevention of mental illness rather than its treatment. Its proponents developed environmental explanations of mental health, arguing that socioeconomic problems such as poverty, inequality, and social isolation were the underlying causes of mental illness. The influence of social psychiatry contributed to th...

Today I talked to Roger Blackwell about his new book Objective Prosperity: How Behavioral Economics Can Improve Outcomes for You, Your Business, and Your Nation (Rothstein Publishing, 2022) Contrary to conventional wisdom, about 90% of billionaires are self-made as opposed to people who inherited their wealth. Why did they succeed? That’s the question this book explores at both the individual and...

Professor Sarah Willen talks about her part in creating the Pandemic Journaling Project and how that has morphed into a series of visual exhibitions that emphasis how we all can work to create new histories, shape archives, and reclaim our own creativity and power. Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website. Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod Learn m...

At thirteen, Ed Cohen was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease—a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him in his early twenties. At his diagnosis, his doctors told him that the best he could hope for would be periods of remission. Unfortunately, doctors never mentioned healing as a possibility.  In On Learning to Heal or, What Medicine Doesn't Know (Duke UP, 2022), Cohen draws on fifty years...

Is medical assistance in dying, or MAID letting the government off the hook from providing what they should be providing? Should we respect people's choices on harm reduction grounds, even if those choices are severely constrained by an unjust social and political context? Should we give doctors this power over the mentally ill and disabled, given the racist and ableist nature of our crumbling hea...

Christopher M. Palmer's book Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health (Benbella Books, 2022) will forever change the way we understand and treat mental health. If you or someone you love is affected by mental illness, it might change your life. We are in the midst of a global mental health crisis, and mental illnesses are on the rise. But what causes mental illness...

This is the story of organ transplantation, told from the organ’s point of view. Organs for transplantations come from two sources: living or post-mortem organ donations. These sources set different routes of movement from one body to another. Postmortem organ donations are mainly sourced and allocated by state agencies, while living organ donations are the result of informal relations between don...

This week, RBI Director John Torpey talked with William Hurst, Professor of Political Science at Cambridge University, about the origins of the protests in China, how they differ from those in 1989, and the possibilities of regime change. Hurst delves into the mobilization and contentious politics of China and its local-central interplay, where protesters act as rational actors who use different s...

For two years the COVID-19 pandemic has upended the world. The physician and medical historian Jacalyn Duffin presents a global history of the virus, with a focus on Canada. In Covid-19: A History ( McGill-Queen's UP, 2022), Duffin describes the frightening appearance of the virus and its identification by scientists in China; subsequent outbreaks on cruise ships; the relentless spread to Europe,...

We are all citizens of the Biomedical Empire, though few of us know it, and even fewer understand the extent of its power. In this book, Barbara Katz Rothman clarifies that critiques of biopower and the "medical industrial complex" have not gone far enough, and asserts that the medical industry is nothing short of an imperial power. Factors as fundamental as one's citizenship and sex identity—driv...

The term “mental illness” can itself be anxiety-inducing and depressing. There are words, though, that can counter the fears and stresses that mind-related conditions induce in most of us at some point in our lives. One of those bracing, comforting words is, “flourishing.” That welcome word abounds in the 2021 book From Survive to Thrive: Living Your Best Life with Mental Illness (Johns Hopkins UP...

Advances in medicine have made possible better treatments for widespread, familiar human illnesses like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Yet there are thousands of much less common diseases, most of genetic origin, each classed as rare because it afflicts only a small number of people. These patient groups were long ignored by a pharmaceutical industry that judged them too small to provide a r...

How should humans respond to our ongoing human-made climate catastrophe? To answer that question, Recall this Book turned to prize-winning climate reporter Elizabeth Kolbert, who visited Brandeis this Fall. The topic was Under a White Sky, her recent book that documents the responses to the climate crisis ranging from a form of climate engineering that shoots reflective particles into the air to c...

Michael Bess is the Chancellor's Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His fifth and most recent book is Planet in Peril: Humanity’s Four Greatest Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. This study focuses on the existential risks posed by climate change, nuclear weapons, pandemics (natural or bioengineered), and artificial intelligence –...