_How Not to Die_, Jan Garavaglia, M.D.

Subtitled: Surprising Lessons on Living Longer, Safer and Healthier from America's Favorite Medical Examiner Dr. G

Apparently there's a TV show on Discovery Health.

I picked this up off a display table at some chain bookstore a couple months ago. I've really enjoyed books about dying and examining dead bodies in the past (_Dead Men Do Tell Tales_ was particularly excellent for bodies, and both _Death in Yellowstone_ and _Over the Edge_ were really good books about dying). Unfortunately, this is not an excellent book. It's okay. It's readable. It's plausible and the stories are interesting. The problem is there aren't enough stories, and there's a lot too much moralizing. _Over the Edge_ has dozens of stories for each dumb way to die in the Grand Canyon; Dr. G. presents one or maybe two examples for each of her sample causes of deaths (actually, sometimes not even one or two). The last chapter of the book is a sort of Smile! It'll Make You Feel Better paean to positive thinking, something that's pretty much always guaranteed to annoy me.

Her sum-up at the end also irritates me. As is all to often the case, the doc is focused on "knowing your numbers" (BMI, blood pressure, cholesterol, lipids, blood sugar, blah, blah, bleeping blah) and maybe taking some pills for them (statins) and much less focused on the importance of eating better and being more active. Don't get me wrong -- in the text, she's all about the eat better and exercise and has some nice little stories of what works for her. It's the summary at the end I'm complaining about.

I don't think reading this book will hurt anyone, and there's a chance it would be a wake-up call to someone. Also, there's a lot of fun to be had in thinking how much smarter one is than those poor fools that let X or Y do them in. YMMV, of course. I'll be passing this along to the local library.

a few more words about Apple

It was a revelation to learn that all mothers -- breastfeeding or artificial feeding -- for the first half of the 20th century were told to supplement their babies with orange juice (for vitamin C) and cod liver oil (for vitamin D). The idea was to prevent scurvy and rickets, of course.

Which explains in part what the hell my mother may have been thinking, feeding me OJ at 6 weeks of age.

_Know Your Chances_, Steven Woloshin, Lisa M. Schwartz and H. Gilbert Welch

Subtitled: Understanding Health Statistics / How to See Through the Hype in Medical News, Ads and Public Service Announcements

With H. Gilbert Welch's name on the cover, a book would have to go a long ways out of its way to make me unhappy.

This book made me very happy.

There are a lot of people and organization out there trying to get us to know our numbers and to take action based on those numbers. In much the same way that manufacturers of infant formula, doctors who gave advice regarding infant formula and so on said (and say) that "breast is best" and then blithely proceed to act as if breastfeeding is so unlikely and inconvenient an activity that no one will _actually_ engage in it (or, if they do, it won't work, or they'll stop soon, or they'll need to supplement or blah, blah, bleeping blah), advice about our numbers almost invariably says, stop smoking get exercise and eat healthfully -- and then proceeds to talk about medication options. And that's assuming they aren't going full bore on something even more invasive.

Woloshin et al provide a thin, readable and randomized control trial tested and published in a peer reviewed journal proven effective book (really! see page 105) on how to make sense of health research and advice from all sources. They show how to figure out if you've been told the group of people the research and/or advice applies to, what the starting risk is, what the modified risk is -- and how to recast that calculated per 1000 folk over ten years so have a consistent baseline. It's a beautiful, simple, clear and effective approach.

Buy a copy! Buy two and give one to a friend! Memorize this book, or at least consult the charts at the end frequently (which you can also download on the web -- I know I did that before I got the book). I don't think there's anyone alive and reading that would not benefit from this book.