Poorly written, with unfair and inaccurate representation of alternative medicine
929661
I've been a Robin Cook fan for years, and enjoy his medical thrillers.  This one is not up to his standards. It is poorly written with an unrealistic plot.

He also went on a major rant against alternative medicine, especially chiropractic adjustment and the danger of vertebral artery dissection.  He lumps all alternative medicine together as placebo at best, and life threatening at worst.

Any real analysis of alternative medicine needs to keep in mind the following:

Alternative medicine involves a wide variety of methods, some scientific and some not, some safe and some not.  Lumping them together as universally unscientific, ineffective, and dangerous is simply not true.

It is estimated that 1 in 25 people admitted to hospitals acquire infections from the hospital.

It has been estimated that iatrogenic  (caused by medical intervention) disease is the third most common cause of death in the United States.  If one is going to attack alternative medicine as dangerous, one needs to compare it to conventional medicine.

Vertebral artery dissection is tragic, but rare.  All medical interventions and pharmaceuticals have side effects.  Sometimes they cause fatalities. If we are to condemn any methodology because of a rare tragedy, we will condemn many conventional medical treatments that may be frequently beneficial.  (I personally have seen a 40 year old man die due to a rare complication of anesthesia following hemorrhoid surgery.)

If Robin Cook wants to do a critique of alternative medicine, he should do his homework and present a more balanced viewpoint.
4787549
Reading this book was a constant tension between the suspicion that doctors are arrogant and know less than they think and the even stronger suspicion that sociologists are much the same.

The authors consistently ignore the positives in medicine. They discuss antibiotics, for example, only as something wrongly prescribed for viruses such as the common cold. There's no hint that bacterial infections, even something as simple as a middle ear infection, can kill without them. Vaccines are likewise dismissed by a minimal (and minimizing) discussion of the polio vaccine, ignoring all other types. Additionally the narrative device where author A talks about some point and author B agrees "how awful!" gets very annoying.

If you're already set on being anti-doctor, and are lucky enough to be generally healthy, this book will probably give you a warm fuzzy feeling without doing you much harm. That's the kindest thing I can say about it.
3376592
The authors of the book present themselves as unbiased, but I found the book to be extremely biased against alternative treatments in general.  Their discussion of chiropractic in particular is blatently biased against the profession and includes all sorts of rumor and innuendo, glaringly absent of any of the data they so fervently profess to subscribe to.  I say, either substantiate your claims or don't, but the authors seem to like to play both sides of the fence in order to pursue their agenda.  Now that these guys have "proven" that chiropractic is a sham, I have to go to little Anna and tell her that she has to stop walking.  If chiropractic is only good for some back pains, it could never have gotten her to throw those crutches away and walk for the first time in 6 years and after 7 doctors told her she never would.
This book is a tremendous disservice to the world: a scathing indictment of treatments, some of which simply do not operate in the realm that the narrow reductionist paradigm of western science can currently measure.  "Evidence-based medicine" relies on studies like randomized clinical trials as the gold standard (a standard that medicine itself rarely applies to its own treatments).  Yet RCT's fail to take into consideration the emotional, mental, interpersonal and spiritual component of the healing process.  EBM in fact considers these factors to be "disruptive" to the pursuit of quality data.  However, the fact is that a person's emotional, mental, interpersonal and spiritual experiences are critical and dynamic elements of their healing process, whether western medicine and science can measure them or not.  Alternative therapies like chiropractic do not consider these elements distractions or "placebos", they are integrated into a comprehensive paradigm for healing.  Had this book been impassive and objective as it describes itself, it would only be reckless.  As it is, a highly biased and narrow minded joy ride, it is directly harmful to the public, most of whom will be unable to discriminate between the facts and the opinions.  Were their intentions purely unbiased as they claim, their next tome would be a scathing indictment of western medicine and it would be called, "Maybe Acupuncture is not such a bad idea: the Lack of Evidence in Modern Medicine".

John P.A. Ioannidis, chief of the Prevention Research Center at Stanford University, and medicine's top "mythbuster", set out to subject biomedical research to its own standards of proof: evidence and data.  His question: how many biomedical studies are wrong?

His answer: most.

According to Ioannidis, the unbalanced treatment of positive and negative trials (the negative ones being those which show a drug or treatment failing to be effective- these, he discovered, "sit in a file drawer, or the trial keeps going in hopes the results turn positive.") lead to skewed research results.
`"People are being hurt and even dying" because of false medical claims, he says: not quackery, but errors in medical research", reports Sharon Begley in Newsweek (Jan 24th, 2011)  Ioannidis' early work debunked several claims that certain genes were the cause of illnesses like Parkinsons (debunked in 2010) and cardiovascular disease (2009). Begley writes: "Geneticists have mostly mended their ways, tightening statistical criteria, but other fields still need to clean house, Ioannidis says.

Surgical practices, for instance, have not been tested to nearly the extent that medications have. "I wouldn't be surprised if a large proportion of surgical practice is based on thin air, and [claims for effectiveness] would evaporate if we studied them closely," Ioannidis says."

I'll stick with chiropractic, thank you very much.
4032115
This book begins with a description of the legal charges brought against the author in the USA by the DEA. This person places themselves out there as a victim of the DEA and is described as such in the book, but the book fails to mention that the author fled the country and is still wanted on MDMA charges according to the DEA website (and not the DMT/Ayahuasca charges described in the book). So, while the book tells tales of his experiences with Ayahuasca, it fails to tell the truth of who the author is and why he is really there in Peru. He is on the run from the law and wanted by the DEA so if he leaves where he is now, he can be picked up and sent back to prison, but this is left out of the narrative in the book.
 Honesty to self and others and integrity in using ceremonial plant medicines are important concepts. In one of the chapters the author tells of lying to the shaman because he wanted to get laid- which is indicative of dishonesty and lack of respect for the ceremonial processes. And, while most advise or require adherence to restrictions concerning food, drugs, alcohol, and sex in the weeks leading up to ceremonies and when sitting in ceremony, the author does not support the idea of the Ayahuasca diet claiming it is unnecessary because it does not suit his own inability to abide ceremonial restriction. His own behavior in the book is ceremonially irresponsible and he is dishonest to the shaman which is a massive disrespect. But if you read only this book and look no further, you would imagine the author as some expat living in Peru, dedicating his life to healing people with plant medicines. Ayahuasca is known as a tool for personal evolution and growth. Shoemaker speaks of his hundreds of times drinking Ayahuasca but where is the evidence of personal evolution and growth from the author?  You can safely learn more accurate information from many other sources and books and websites. Buyer Beware. This book is so full of holes that it is more a work of fiction based on facts than anything else.
1901591
A biased book, written by a far religious Reich person who calls " evil" all sorts of subjects he "coincidentally" dislikes or hates. Among the so-called evils he lists include atheism, Paganism, gay rights, feminism and OC liberalism. Atrociously factually incorrect, highly biased and not about actual evils at all.

As a Pagan, a Goddess worshipper, I naturally took offense at this author calling my beliefs "evil."  After reading that chapter, Chapter  6, pgs. 115-138, titled ( no surprise) "False Gods", where he distorts Wicca and Pagan beliefs, I sighed and shook my head at the bad scholarship and distortions of facts. Turns out that chapter is typical of the low quality and misinformation throughout the book.

At best this book would be of interest of critics of the far right or observers of religion based intolerance and bigotries. As a factual objective look into evil, this book is a failure and ironically condones religious intolerance, ignorance and prejudice, things I would consider evil.

The Amazon promo praises shown above written by whomever listed this book is to me a red flag on how truly awful this book is. The heavier and thicker the listing praises, the shallower the book usually turns out to be. I prefer being told from the start what the book is about, not vain praises about the author or listing ( in this case overdoing it) praise reviews from other sources. What does the book cover, what is the author's approach and whether or not the author has relevant credibility are things I want to know if I want to get the book or not.

This book is frankly worth it only if you get it fior less than a dollar, and even then if you are interested in bias, the subjects he disses or to exercise you critical thinking skills.
4410403
I recently engaged in correspondence with Ms. Zerbey and from what I can dictate, her only goal is writing this book was to cash-in on the recent popularity of the issue of health care in America. In our exchange, she stated that all humans in the United States can be treated in the emergency department of any hospital regardless of their race or country of origin. While this is law, it doesn't always happen, as her book should outline. When I pointed out to her how untrue her observation was, including citing instances of neglect at King County Hospital in 2007 and two Denver, Colorado hospitals in 2003, I was told by Ms. Zerbey that citing (and she couldn't even spell that correctly in our correspondence) two instances out of 350 million Americans in this country hardly makes my point valid. But isn't that the subject of her book, to pinpoint the horrors of our current health care system and address them head-on? Apparently that wasn't her goal because if it were, she would have recognized the two situations addressed, especially the story of Esmin Green, are not lone incidents.
I'm not in favor of universal health care. I think the current health care issues, including patient care, need to be addressed before going further.
If you're looking for truth in literacy, don't buy this book because the person who wrote it obviously doesn't care about health rights or health care for people in this country.
4249017
The book presents an account of the author's experience, but it is
not a proof of heaven. It is a description of hallucinations experienced by a sick patient in a coma.
It is not scientific and full of logical fallacies.

The author is trying to claim extra credibility because he is a neurosurgeon, which is absolutely irrelevant: A neurosurgeon is a doctor trained in removing tumors from the brain, and doctors can hallucinate just like any other person. Actually, an honest doctor should be aware of the fact that people can hallucinate and have a more critical and sceptical attitude to claims of extraordinary experiences, even his own.

Finally, he claims to have acquired valuable information while unconscious, but he will not share any of it with the reader. I am looking forward to Dr Alexander chiselling this knowledge into gold tablets, storing them in the cellar of a temple, and looking for gullible individuals willing to pay $1,000,000 to have a look at it.
1578786
The book is written as the end all and be all of good health, which it is not. Twitchell promotes some very dangerous myths about herbs in general and some very blatant *unscientific* so-called facts. His system of categorizing people by *mineral types* is unfounded and smacks of sheer  quackery. Herbs is a conglomeration of all the important psuedo-scientific  nutrition myths of the 18th and 19th centuries. Of all the books by  Twitchell this is the worst one because it promotes unsound nutritional  theories that even most Holistic Practitioners stay away from. What further  makes the book unusable is how Twitchell weaves his *ancient knowledge of  the Eck Masters* together with his own unique theories of body health. The book lacks any credible *sources* to this  so-called *ancient healing theory.* If Twitchells nutritional advice is  followed by diabetics or those suffering from HIV/AIDS there could be  catastrophic consequences to health. Be warned about this book. Let the  consumer beware.
2463508
I'm begrudgingly giving this two stars because it really did impress me in one way:

Attempting to read it straight through gave me the most amazing headache!

It's pretty clear this guy has honed his writing skills in academia.  Many actual research papers throw around less jargon, less often, than this book does.  But in slogging patiently from page to page (with very necessary rest breaks) I did discover one coherent idea emerging:  This is a book written by a fellow who wants to defend himself, and not with the rigor of a peer-reviewed essay, but with the fervor of a manifesto, eagerly twisting whatever facts and history he can gather together that show him as the persecuted and beleaguered David against the Goliath of "big pharma".

(Now, if you want to read about the evils of "big pharma", I suggest you read another much more approachable and amusing book, called "Bad Pharma", written by a fellow called Ben Goldacre, but that's beside the point.)

A fair way into "Callous Disregard", when the one-sidedness of Wakefield's narrative was too obvious to ignore, I got curious and did some digging around.  Turns out this book was released on the same day he attended his final hearing in front of the UK General Medical Council, and the conclusion of that hearing was the following:

Wakefield's infamous study in the Lancet linking the MMR vaccine to autism was a written-for-hire work.  He was paid to conduct the study in the paper, by attorneys who were trying to drum up evidence that their clients' children had been harmed by the MMR vaccine, so they could sue the big pharmaceutical company that manufactured it.  He never told the Lancet about this extreme conflict of interest, and he falsified the data in the paper to give the attorneys ammunition in their lawsuit.

That is an absolutely incredible violation of ethics.

The way he went about gathering his "data" in the paper was extremely callous as well.  He used questionable tactics to recruit children for the study.  He ordered procedures on them that were medically unnecessary, such as colonoscopies, colon biopsies and lumbar punctures, without consulting a pediatrician and without the approval of his department's ethics board.

That's not the conduct of a person who claims to love children as stridently as Wakefield does in this book.

On May 24, 2010, he was struck off the United Kingdom medical register.  But that just fueled his narrative as a persecuted whistleblower.  Caught with his hand in the falsification cookie jar, he doubled-down and crammed the other hand in, then two legs and most of his face.  In the meantime, eight years after his faked paper ignited the media fire that he has been gleefully fanning ever since, cases of measles in Britain rose from 56 in 1998 to nearly 1,400 in 2008.

In 2006, a 13-year-old boy became the first person in more than a decade to die of the disease in Britain.

Holy crap, this guy has blood on his hands!

Now I understand why the book is so quick to make accusations and counter-accusations, and so eager to shout "conspiracy".  Wakefield wrote it during a time when he needed to convince himself that he was a good person, despite willfully committing fraud.  This book is a call to gather conspiracy theorists and fearful parents around him in a protective circle, and ditch his career as a scientist before it ditched him.

Needless to say, I have not finished this book.
1851445
This book is a waste of money.  The author tries to scare the readers instead of inform them. Her patronizing judgements make me sorry I spent good money on this garbage. It is extremely biased, and she presents erronious conclusions to scientific articles. For example, p. 107 she writes "Research shows that the increased appetite that troubles women using the shot may be due to a direct effect on the brain, where a particular set of neurons tends to accumulate concentrations of the drug." The actual science was conducted in male monkeys, and the research had nothing to do with feeding or body weight. The author presents any positive benefit of the pill as a negative.  It is accepted and well-known that hormonal contraception has some down-sides.  But the author can't even stay focused on menstruating women. In chapter 4 she devotes 2 pages to a poem then spends the rest of it on research in postmenopausal women.  I think this author would be happier seeing all women barefoot and pregnant. The last chapter (8 pages) is evangelical in the promotion of menstruation as sexy! If you want to be judged negatively and patronized for wanting choices from science and biology, this book is for you.
1471882
This book has misguided more people than can be imagined. Taking advantage of a nationalist Back to Africa movement, the author has written his version of African medicine. The problem is... it's simply not... Some of the theories are so outlandish it's amazing people have taken it so far. For instance, for the last 75,000 years or so, Africans have documented proof of being hunters and eating meat. The author says they were vegetarians. The author says menstrual cycles are hemmoraging ... The author is clearly not a trained doctor but actually only an LPN, again misleading people.  He is not even a traditionally trained African herbalist in any African ethnic group! Traditional African Medicine is far more complicated and holistic than this mess presented.
2705658
The credibility of any reference the book makes to scientific information is questionable.  WebMD and Wikipedia are not good resources.  I don't feel the author is experienced enough (educationally) to make any assumptions on child-rearing or educational support for troubled youth.  I would not recommend this book to anyone.
1805835
James Frey wrote a book lauded as a memoir, which turns out to be untrue.
Similarly, this book was lauded as a good read.
This as it turns out, is also untrue.
The story of the journey through rehab is repetitious - but its worst offense is that the characters are unsympathetic.
It's hard to feel sorry for them, despite their dire circumstances.
Finally, this story depicts a series of dental appointments that require extensive surgery without local anesthesia.
This is a ridiculous fabrication.
Drug abuse is not a contraindication for local anesthesia.
39376
My biggest concern with this book was the fact that one of the co-authors, Robert Sears is a large proponent of not vaccinating children or of doing it on an alternate timeline. Given the multitude of scientific research that has disproved links between vaccines and autism and other injuries, providing advice to not vaccinate is irresponsible to the point of malpractice. Given this, I wouldn't feel comfortable taking any medical advice from this book. After all, medicine is a scientific discipline. If the authors are going to completely ignore proven science in favor of the information presented by a discredited clinician who was shown to have falsified the data in his studies, it causes me to question any and all advice that they present. There may have been some good information in the book but it isn't worth my time to have to screen every bit of it to make sure they aren't using sham medicine to guide their advice. There are so many better resources out there.

On a much less important note, I found a lot of the advice in this book to be a little bit condescending. Take for example, the advice to "ignore any well-meaning friends or family members who told you that breast feeding just didn't work for them." Sears goes on to say that the only reason it didn't work for them was that they didn't do it in a supportive environment with proper help. The truth is, it just isn't an option for some women and their children - be it physical, lifestyle or just flat out choice and judging these women isn't productive. The same goes for the 'helpful' steering of women to be stay at home moms. I felt like there was a lot of shaming the mother for not making (or not being able to make) the recommended 'right' choice couched as helpful advice.

As a parent, you need solid information, not a book making blanket judgments and providing incorrect and dangerous information. This book is not that source of solid information.
1892670
To potential readers:

This books is absent with real details or true effective alternatives to disease prevention and cure.  There is no true nutritional content either.  Moreover, the book is written in a very disorganized, haphazard fashion, which at times is very difficult to understand because of the poorly contructed language used.  Lastly, the book ultimately proves an advertisement lure for his webstie, which you are directed to visit to subscribe to a membership to learn of the "true" cures said contained in the book.  It's a total rip-off.

To readers and users of the book:

Have you or a loved one used the so-called "cures," like Coral Calcium in trying to "cure" either cancer, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, or ADHD?  Not working, right?  The law is very exact in how "cure" is used and what it means: it should work every time for everyone.  Hence there is a legal basis to sue Mr. Kevin Trudeau for false advertisement and I highly encourage you to sue the pants off the lying, weaseling little thief and report him to the FTC!
492984
Jesus wept! What a waste of paper and ink. Somewhere there is a forest bereft of trees that were used to print this diabolical string of lies and what's worse is she is charging people for having to read this steaming pile of dung. Knowing that she is peddling pseudoscience and charging for it is fraud. Don't waste your hard earned cash on crap like this, buy a book that has proper health and nutritional advice backed by sound science.
3496641
Based in the title and notes and what I know about current hospital procedures' effects on moms and babies, I wanted to love and recommend this book. I can't.

I wanted this to be a list of research on the harm done by routine hospital procedures with notations that I could recommend to other people in the birthing community. It Isn't.

This book is a compilation of data which was gathered to support the author's assertion that certain religious groups/bloodlines are trying to control the rest of the population via their stranglehold on the hospital system. If you have read anything about the eugenics movements of the 1940s you have already read the information presented in this book. I cannot recommend this book to anyone other than as a study on how 'quantifiable data' can be presented in such a way as to make the assertions of the presenter appear valid.

Edit for clarification: A large percentage of the 'quantifiable data' was, in fact, not quantifiable at all, but links to blog posts and websites containing people's opinions, including the author's blog. Even when I was in high school quoting one's own self was not considered a valid source. I put 'quantifiable data' in quotes for a reason.

I am attaching a quick shot from the page on circumcision - the author and I agree it is a practice that should be left in the history books - we will have to agree to disagree on the why.

I am returning the book.