This 60-page booklet explains the nutritional and medicinal benefits of 11 types of mushrooms: Agaricus, Chaga, Cordyceps, Coriolus, Enoki, Lion’s Mane, Maitake, Meshima, Reishi, Shitake, and Tremella. “There are 38,000 species of mushrooms. Species can differ greatly in their chemical content. For example, about 50 species of mushrooms are poisonous and another 50 demonstrate medicinal value.”
The Take-Charge Patient: How You Can Get the Best Medical Care
by Martine Ehrenclou
Being a take-charge patient is about being a proactive member of your health care team. The book includes advice on primary care and specialist physician visits, avoiding medication errors, surgeries and hospital stays, patient advocates, and some tips on dealing with insurance and billing.
The author recommends you prepare three documents.
Edible and Medicinal Mushrooms of New England and Eastern Canada: A Photographic Guidebook to Finding and Using Key Species
by David L. Spahr
This book presents photographs and information on more than 20 varieties of mushrooms, including how to find them and prepare them. For this review I will focus on the chapter on Maitake, which is being studied for its potential to boost the immune system and fight cancer.
Affordable Excellence: The Singapore Healthcare Story
by William A. Haseltine
The Singapore healthcare system produces world-class outcomes at half the cost of Western European countries and less than one-fourth the cost of the United States: Singapore spends 4% of GDP on healthcare; the United States spends 18%. The World Health Organization ranked Singapore 6th in overall performance; the United States ranked 37th. (See page 200, The World Health Report 2000.)
Looking at costs of specific procedures, ”an angioplasty in the United States is almost $83,000, while in Singapore the cost is about $13,000. A gastric bypass in the United States is almost $70,000, while in Singapore the cost is $15,000. (These figures are in US dollars and include at least one day of hospitalization).”
Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It
by Michael F. Cannon and Michael D. Tanner
Healthy Competition was published in 2005, but I pulled it off my shelf and reread it in early 2017, in the midst of the discourse about how to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (ACA, also known as Obamacare). Both the ACA and the proposed replacement focus on insurance, ignoring the exorbitant cost of health care in the United States. In this book, Cato Institute scholars Michael Cannon and Michael Tanner examine how the basic economic principles of price transparency, competition, and consumer choice could lower costs, reduce waste, and increase quality of care.
Urgent Care: 10 Cures for America’s Ailing Healthcare System
by Minda Wilson, J.D.
As I write this in early 2017, there is much chatter about the potential repeal and replacement of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) commonly known as Obamacare. I was motivated to read this book to get beyond the myopic hysteria and gain a deeper understanding of the problems and possible solutions presented by healthcare attorney Minda Wilson.
“The United States has the world’s highest [per-capita] healthcare cost, double that of Canada… The number one cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States is due to overbearing healthcare costs… A devastating illness means that, beyond your deductible, you could be responsible for a minimum of 30 percent of the medical bills incurred if you stay in-network. If you go outside of your network, then you could be responsible for between 50 percent and 100 percent of every bill.”
Wilson asks, “Why did the [ACA] focus on providing insurance and not healthcare?” I think this is the fundamental issue. The cost of insurance is a function of the cost of claims. So if the main focus is on subsidizing premiums, the law simply masked the underlying problem rather than solving it. “To be clear, deductibles, copays, and/or the costs of excluded care or limits on care were not included in this measure of affordability.”
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
by Atul Gawande, M.D.
This book is about aging with autonomy and dying with dignity.
“The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a sliver’s chance of benefit. They are spent in institutions—nursing homes and intensive care units—where regimented, anonymous routines cut us of from all the things that matter to us in life. Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need… What if there are better approaches, right in front of your eyes, waiting to be recognized?”
Clean Gut: The Breakthrough Plan for Eliminating the Root Cause of Disease and Revolutionizing Your Health
by Alejandro Junger, M.D.
Dr. Alejandro Junger is a cardiologist and a practitioner of functional medicine who concludes that gut dysfunction is the root cause of “most of the chronic diseases affecting people today as well as many acute problems.” Doctors will often treat symptoms rather than the root cause. Dr. Junger’s approach is to put the patient on a detoxification diet first. This often solves the problem; other times it unmasks problems, such as parasites and yeast overgrowth.
“Most nutritional advice we’ve received over the last half century has actually made us less healthy and considerably fatter…[Americans] suffer substantially higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity than people eating any number of different traditional diets.”
Is your New Year’s resolution to hit the gym, but you don’t really know what to do once you get there? With Strength Training Anatomy, a picture really is worth 1000 words.
Each page features an illustration of an exercise being performed, with the targeted muscles drawn in red and labeled. Most of the exercises use either free weights or a weight-training machine; there are some exceptions, such as crunches. Each page also includes written instructions. See the sample page below.
The Key Point 