Customer Reviews

The Pursuit of Perfection: The Promise and Perils of Medical Enhancement

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Bought this hoping it would give me some understanding of all the scandals with doping. Waste of time and money.

The Tour De France scandals of years back, the TGH steriods cases, Bobby Bonds, Sammy Sosa, east german swimmers, trck and field, etc. These are guys truly pursuing perfection. That was going after Roger Maris is all about.

Not a word. Just a dry academic tome on history of endinocrinology. Blah blah blah.

Anyone want to buy a used copy?

After seeing David Rothman on the Daily Show I was eagerly awaiting the publication of this book. I had mixed feelings upon its release: while its ignorance and paternalism made me repeatedly laugh out loud, it made me quite depressed to think that these people are the leading scholars in this field and that devoted so much of their lives to the writing of such drivel.

As other reviewers below have noted, the Rothmans know no science. Will someone please explain to them that a hormonal disorder (endocrine) can be genetic?!?

Moreover, the patronizing tone is just too much. But you knew that if you've ever met them or read anything else they've written (see New York Review of Books articles on organ sales for examples, which is also extraordinarily racist).

Don't waste your time and certainly don't give anyone else this book, for the holidays or otherwise.

I only wish Amazon would let me give it zero stars.

Don't be swayed by all the positive review belows. This book is a clunker.

The authors had the right idea: to explore how medicine and technology (often combined) is on the verge of creating and turning us into Frankensteins. Cloning and genetically modified foods are the obvious examples that come to mind.

But Viagra?!? Liposuction?!? Hormone replacement therapy!?! Let's get serious folks. These are quality of life issues. And seriously everything involves a risk. Investing in tech stocks involves risk. Does that mean people shouldn't be allowed to do it?

And there lies the heart of the problem with this book. The authors are extraordinarily paternalistic to the audience and to the consumers of medicine as a whole. I have no idea of their politics, be it reads like it written by a couple of limousine liberals. We now what is best for you. Yawn!!!

And notice that is even how all the reviews below read: listen to us, we can save your life. (It almost makes you wonder if it isn't the PR dept or the authors themselves writing the reviews....)

It was a great idea, just now idea why the focused on what they did.

Found this an exceedingly difficult read. Not because it was controversial or hit home. But becuase was more boring then watching the grass grow. The prose is dry. The authors ramble on and on. And so much of it is history or just lifted straight from medicial journals.

Do something more interesting with your time: watch paint dry.

I bought this book to understand the issues surrounding estrogewn use in women. THe reviews on this website seemed encouraging....

The information provided was outdated, inaccuarte and useless

The Rothmans' are good at raising questions but questions without answers are an endless source of frustation.

As I read this book, I couldn't help but thinking of Lucy Grealy heartbreaking book, "Autobiography of a Face." As a very young girl, Ms. Grealy was diagnosed with a horrible and nearly always fatal form of her cancer that required the removal of nearly 1/3 of her entire jaw. Her faced was remarkably deformed and as a girl and young adult she was subjected to countless taunting and ostracization by society. She underwent through over 40 surgeries to try and repair her jaw, all of them painful and none of them successful.

But while it was mainly beauty that Lucy Grealy was seaking, there were all serious medical reasons for her wanting her face back. Was Lucy Grealy seeking an "enhancement" or a "cure"? Were Lucy Grealy's doctor wrong to help her seek her jaw back? Does it change the answer to know that Lucy Grealy's pain (from both the surgeries and societal pressures of beauty) led to her drug addiction and ultimate death? Do women who have double mastecomies have more "right" to a breast implants then women who are simply seeking their ideal of a female body? How do we begin to draw the line?

These are fascinating questions. And I would love to read a book that helped think through them. Unforutantely this is not that book.

The Rothmans' barely even raise these question much less answer them. They preach about risks and costs but this is a life of gray zones. And it so easy to say that women in LA shouldn't seek liposuction to obtain the perfect butt, but much more difficult to say that the woman who had her face slashed with a razor by a mugger on the New York City subway a decade or so ago shouldn't have access to plastic surgery to "repair" her face.

But fundamentally what are the principals that say "nea" to one and "yeah" to the other. Isn't this ultimately personal? And if one accepts the risks who are the Rothman's to say otherwise?!?

Of course the line between enhancement and cure is fuzzy (do we really need a 320 page book to tell us that!) the question is when is it enhancement and when is it cure? On this the authors are silent. And a series of cases would have been very helpful to get us thinking.

We don't need history lessons. Real life examples would have been so much better.

Finally I am deeply disturbed by the distinction the Rothmans' make between endocrinology and genetics. It is really the same thing. Diabetes can be inherited after all. Shocking that two professors at a medical don't see this.

But it is exactly this lack of deep and clear thinking that the book is missing and makes it such a frustrating read.

The New York Times Sunday magazine had a long cover piece about the pursuit of perfection among elite athletes today. Did they quote from this book once? NO. Did they interview the authors? NO. Why? Because this book has nothing relevant to say about any of the controversies going on in the world to regarding enhancement.

This is a history lesson. Another boring lecture by boring people with nothing to help guide us through the morass of today and tomorrow's very real dilemmas.

If you are looking for a guide to understanding the enhancement mess we are in today, look elsewhere. Policy wanks, politicans, doctors in the field, women facing the choice of whether or not to take estrogen, my advice to you is not to buy this book.

But if you are for a very (!) a dry recitation of history and the history of endocrinology at that, then I guess this is your book.

I bought this book the first day it went on sale, as the topic, which has been hotly discussed for so long is not only an interest for me but it is a passion, a profession, and intimately related to the subjects of both my Masters and my Phd. I have read, I believe, most of the literature on this topic, written reviews for many, critiqued many more still in the pipelines.

Therefore, it is with great authority that I say that this is one of the weakest works on the subject. The authors clearly have no medical education, and make no excuses for it. This is fine for a historian (as I believe one reviewer pointed out David Rothman and Sheila Rothman are), but not for one who wishes to work in the field of bioethicism. To do so requires not just a strong opinion, which these authors have and use to preach at us ad-nauseum, but a clear understanding of the facts, which these authors clearly do not grasp.

Writing such a manifesto without understanding the facts makes the reader wonder "why?" Have the authors such poor experiences with the medical profession as a whole (perhaps a childhood illness or a horrific experience with their own plastic surgery while pursuing prefection?) Or do they simply wish to play with the big boys? If the later is true, my advice is to take some basic medical classes.

The topics chosen (estrogen, growth hormone, etc) are interesting, but the lack of knowlege makes this book one that I cannot reccommend and would strongly encourage others to stay away from. A little knowlege can be a bad thing on this subject. Until the Rothmans get more they should put down their pens.

What this book does contribute: an explanation of how the rise of endocrinology--e.g., success in diagnosing and treating diabetes and hypothyroidism--shaped medical education and popular views about medical possibility.

What this book does NOT contribute: a serious, well-informed discussion of the philosophical problems with enhancement directed medicine. They opine that there are RISKS in the tolerance of the unrestrained pursuit of 'perfection,' but they also shrug off most of the deeper problems (WHOSE vision of perfection?) and fail to appreciate that the risks are NOT merely ones that will be assumed by the individuals who choose to use (or not use) the proffered enhancements.

By my lights, the most serious flaw is the authors' cheery dismissal of the problems raised by the spectre of a resurgence of eugenics. Their account of the Nazi program is both thin and misleading, and their suggestion that eugenic policies in the US were minimal and trivial is seriously historically inaccurate. The basis for dismissing the threat of a renewed eugenics is that we don't have the state control that the Germans did: since enhancement choices will be made 'from below' rather than 'from above'--by freely choosing individual rather than by the state--the authors think that worries about coercion to select enhancements (and SOME enhancements rather than others) are not deep or serious ones. This ignores the considerable literature that discusses the slide from individual choice to social expectation to entrenched policy as well as the literature that painstakingly explains why genetic modification cannot properly be viewed as just another commodity that is--as such--more available to the financially well-heeled.

I wish I had taken the time to read readers' reviews of this book rather than going by the reviews on the back flap.

I've found the Pursuit of Perfection both readable and informative. I come from a family of MD's and let me tell you they're wound up about this book. (I withstood the demands for conformity and went into veterinary medicine myself.) My father, still a practicing GP in a dying Great Plains town whose patients frequently can't pay, feels that his public health orientation has been vindicated. A cousin in cosmetology in Dallas who specializes in liposuction and breast enlargement ... well, I couldn't adequately convey what HE thinks without using rude language. And another cousin in "drug engineering" rants and raves about how "Luddite" the arguments of the authors are but just sputters when you ask him for specifics. In fact, I finally read this book because I'd never heard this clan pitch in at each other about a book in a lay publishing house before.
One of the reviewers said that no notice of this book had appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Isn't that just about fashion and big houses?