For the consumer (such as I) lacking knowledge in medical matters and perplexed, as I have been, by the question of how to assess the current avalanche of health claims and supplements on the internet, in health food shops, in pharmacies and in print, this book is a must-read.
Similar to Dr. Paul Offit's off-putting experience with today's health-care system that he describes in the prologue to his Do You Believe in Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine , my own experience with standard medecine in the past 20-odd years has been likewise a very mixed bag. I have twice faced cancer and survived by submitting to the standard treatments: once for colorectal cancer (stage 3) which meant surgery, chemo, and radiation - the infamous "cut, burn, poison" trilogy - and once for bladder cancer: surgery and chemo. Survive I did; but those remedies came with almost intolerable side effects that made me indifferent, for a time, as to whether I lived or died.
Should some other illness afflict me once more in the future, is there not, I wondered, a way to restored health that's not as brutal? Can there be therapies through unconventional medicine that are gentler, more bearable, but achieve the same objective?
Apparently not. Reading this book taught me this reality: _all_ therapies, not only the conventional "allopathic" ones that we love to hate, must necessarily be held to the same high standard of proof, the test of science, failing which -- to borrow Offit's words -- we'll be hoodwinked at a point in life when we are sick and most vulnerable, by healers who ask us to believe in them rather than in the science that fails to support their claims.
The book "Consumer Health" lists those failures. Is that an instance of "bias", as some commenters have charged? Indeed yes, it _is_ bias, and it is a good and responsible thing, this bias, because it is bias against health care providers telling patients things that are not true, presenting opinions as if they were facts. That bias is a precious service to the public.
I find the book to be a science-based aid that treats of these matters in some detail and helps to classify for the consumer's own protection the huge assortment of healing promotions modalities and nostrums that fall into the scientifically failed category that may alternatively be designated as wishful or magic thinking.
Bottom line: if you value your health, read this book.
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