Category: Medicine / Health

Rating: 6.8/10. How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan Book by journalist Michael Pollan (author of the Omnivore’s Dilemma) about psychedelics like LSD, and its yet untapped potential for medicine. The author is in his 60s and did not…

Rating: 7.9/10. Overdose: Heartbreak and Hope in Canada’s Opioid Crisis by Benjamin Perrin Book about drug policy, centered around the recent opioid epidemic in North America but especially in Vancouver. The problem recently intensified with the introduction of fentanyl, which became popular around 2012. Fentanyl is especially bad because it’s easy to overdose when using…

Rating: 7.5/10. Book with collections of diagnoses, similar to the House TV show. There’s not really a central “point” that the book is trying to make, more like a bunch of insights about the art of diagnosis, interspersed with real-life examples of patients with various diseases and how the doctors figured out what’s wrong with…

Rating: 7.4/10. A lot of people have tooth decay, but the usual treatment is fillings, followed by root canals, crowns, extraction, and there’s not as much emphasis on prevention. This book outlines a program to get healthier teeth. Often, tooth decay is viewed as problems of individual teeth, but actually, tooth decay has to do…

Rating: 8.0/10. The American healthcare system is rotten to its core: the country spends about twice as much on healthcare as other developed countries, and gets worse outcomes. This book by a surgeon and public health researcher examines what’s wrong with the healthcare system. In short, the free market brings prices down only with transparency…

Rating: 8.0/10. Vaccines have been around for a long time, but the immune system hasn’t really been understood until very recently. For example, smallpox vaccine is only effective with an “adjuvant”, nobody understood why, theory is it is needed to activate the immune system to treat it as a threat. The immune system has the…

Rating: 9.0/10. History and science of malaria, a disease that has been around for 500,000 years and is still a problem today, even though many infectious diseases have been eradicated. Malaria is caused by a protozoan parasite that feeds on red blood cells, it’s transmitted by mosquitos. After millennia of co-existence with humans, the parasite…

Rating: 8.2/10. This book explores various illnesses from the perspective of evolutionary biology, to give Darwinian reasons for why we get sick in various ways and their symptoms. It’s important to distinguish between proximate causes (which describes the physiology of the disease) versus evolutionary causes (why it’s evolutionarily beneficial for the body to act this…

Rating: 8.0/10. Book about recreational drugs, by a scientist from the UK. He was controversial and got fired from his position for claiming that alcohol is more harmful than heroin and crack cocaine. In this book, he describes various topics on different drugs, addiction, legalization, public health policy, etc. To a society, alcohol is by…

Rating: 5.0/10. Book by Dr. Dale Bredesen’s protocol which he calls “ReCODE”, otherwise known as the “Bredesen Protocol”. He claims it can reverse Alzheimer’s, through a mixture of a lot of different lifestyle changes to sleep and diet patterns. This is certainly a miraculous claim, to have a cure for AD when so many others…

Rating: 6.3/10. A fairly short book (200 pages) by a team of neuroscientists that covers various aspects of neuroscience like memory, intelligence, emotion, perception. The subject should be very interesting but the book was a dull read, it basically gave a bunch of facts and lacked character, with no attempt to string them together in…

Rating: 7.7/10. This book gives a comprehensive scientific overview of sleep. Although there are still many unanswered questions, there’s been a lot of research lately and this book sums it up. Sleep is a very necessary function of life. Every living organism requires it, although in different amounts, and total lack of sleep very quickly…