Deadly Choices: Coping With Health Risks in Everyday Life [Hardcover]

Jeffrey E., M.D., Ph.D. Harris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1993

This guide explains how to use (and when to ignore) information on confusing and sometimes contradictory advice on everything from AIDS to food additives. With chapters on heterosexual transmission of HIV, exercise, weight control, nutrition, smoking and cancer, this book explains how to cope with the flood of "how-to" books and articles in order to make rational health decisions. It offers a broad framework for understanding claims and counterclaims, and gives the reader a way of assessing risks, and deciding what is "dangerous" and what is not. Harris helps the reader understand the relative importance of lifestyle, genetics and luck.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"With each new medical 'discovery,' the consuming public grows increasingly hard-nosed and wary. My own patients," writes physician Harris, who is also a professor of economics at M.I.T., "have grown so skeptical that they reject the latest health pronouncements out of hand. They see the media, the scientific establishment, and the government as creating a standard of perfection that no one can adhere to." His suggestion? They should hone their critical skills, for the problem won't vanish anytime soon: the experts will continue handing out pronouncements, and the consumer will continue to receive and judge them. This book is meant to put some of those pronouncements in perspective, and to encourage readers to to take an active role in assessing them. Harris wisely picks and chooses his health concerns, which include AIDS, cancer, cholesterol and exercise; frames discussions as composite stories, with plot and dialogue, not just as abstract arguments; and peppers his prose with questions, paradoxes and tartly noted frustrations. In other words, he's a realist who wants to be of use but who has no intention of offering quick solutions. This itself can cause some problems, as an issue is thrashed out, sometimes, to the point of exhaustion as much as conclusion. But generally, Harris is an expert mediator, bringing us into confrontation not only with the claims of experts, but also with our own mixed feelings about health and health dogmas.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

To the lay reader, the published results of medical research often seem confusing, contradictory, even overwhelming. Consider only the evidence presented about cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. Harris (Harvard, MIT) sets out "to decode the messages from the scientific establishment, the media, and the public health officials" on medical research. He presents composite stories drawn from real case histories and examines the consequences of choices made with respect to sex and HIV, exercise, weight control, cholesterol, tobacco, and breast cancer. The analyses tend to become involved. Just as we think we've grasped the issues, we read "but this is just the beginning of the story." The bibliography is impressive, but the text needs editing; it rambles without explaining contradictory research data. For larger public and academic medical collections.
- James Swanton, Albert Einstein Coll. of Medicine, New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; 1St Edition edition (October 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465028896
• ISBN-13: 978-0465028894
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,596,922 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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