Book Club

Host: Brian P. McDonough, MD, FAAFP

Guest: Harley Rotbart, MD

Dr. Brian McDonough speaks with Dr. Harley Rotbart, Professor of Pediatrics at University of Colorado School of Medicine and author of the book Miracles We Have Seen: America's Leading Physicians Share Stories They Can't Forget.

This collection of remarkable stories offers a compelling glimpse into the lives of physicians—their humanity and determined devotion to their patients and their patients' families. It reminds us that what we don't know or don't understand isn't necessarily cause for fear, and can even be reason for hope.

Host: John Russell, MD

Guest: Sanjiv Chopra, MD, FACP

Dr. John Russell talks with Dr. Sanjiv Chopra, author of The Big Five: Five Simple Things You Can Do to Live a Longer, Healthier Life. They discuss 5 easy changes that anyone can implement to improve their overall health.

The book delves into how the underlying promise of every exciting medical discovery, diet, and exercise program is the same: do this, buy this, or eat this and you will look better, live longer, and be healthier. But few books can make the promise of this one: if you adapt these five simple, virtually-free suggestions you will live a longer and healthier life, guaranteed.

This is no fad study. Each of the recommendations outlined in this book has been proven by an overwhelming number of tests, trials, and studies to increase health and lifespan. There are no gimmicks, no catches, no ifs, ands, or buts.

Host: Maurice Pickard, MD

Guest: Rebecca Alexander

Born with a rare genetic mutation called Usher Syndrome type III, Rebecca Alexander has been simultaneously losing both her sight and hearing since she was a child, and was told that she would likely be completely blind and deaf by age 30. Then, at 18, a fall from a window left her athletic body completely shattered.

In Not Fade Away, Rebecca tells her extraordinary story, by turns harrowing, funny and inspiring. She meditates on what she’s lost—from the sound of a whisper to seeing a sky full of stars, and what she’s found in return—an exquisite sense of intimacy with those she is closest to, a love of silence, a profound gratitude for everything she still has, and a joy in simple pleasures that most of us forget to notice.

Not Fade Away is both a memoir of the senses and a unique look at the obstacles we all face—physical, psychological, and philosophical—exploring the extraordinary powers of memory, love, and perseverance. It is a gripping story, an offering of hope and motivation, and an exquisite reminder to live each day to its fullest.

Host: Maurice Pickard, MD

While modern medicine produces miracles, it also delivers care that is too often unsafe, unreliable, unsatisfying, and impossibly expensive. For the past few decades, technology has been touted as the cure for all of healthcare’s ills.

But medicine stubbornly resisted computerization – until now. Over the past five years, thanks largely to billions of dollars in federal incentives, healthcare has finally gone digital.

Yet once clinicians started using computers to actually deliver care, it dawned on them that something was deeply wrong. Why were doctors no longer making eye contact with their patients? How could one of America’s leading hospitals give a teenager a 39-fold overdose of a common antibiotic, despite a state-of-the-art computerized prescribing system? How could a recruiting ad for physicians tout the absence of an electronic medical record as a major selling point?

Logically enough, we’ve pinned the problems on clunky software, flawed implementations, absurd regulations, and bad karma. It was all of those things, but it was also something far more complicated. And far more interesting . . .

Written with a rare combination of compelling stories and hard-hitting analysis by one of the nation’s most thoughtful physicians, The Digital Doctor examines healthcare at the dawn …

Host: John Russell, MD

A fascinating and shocking historical exposé, The Malaria Project is the story of America's secret mission to combat malaria during World War II—a campaign modeled after a German project which tested experimental drugs on men gone mad from syphilis. Karen M. Masterson, a journalist turned malaria researcher, uncovers the complete story behind this dark tale of science, medicine and war.

Host: John Russell, MD

Have you ever wondered what that 1 outlier would say when you see commercials and products boasting that 9 out of 10 doctors recommend something? Dr. H. Eric Bender, co-author of the book 1 Out of 10 Doctors Recommends: Drinking Urine, Eating Worms, and Other Weird Cures, Cases, and Research from the Annals of Medicine, provides real answers that you wouldn't have even thought possible.

Entertaining and informative (and sometimes just plain gross), 1 Out of 10 Doctors Recommends examines the strangest and most unusual medical practices, including: drinking your own urine to fight infection, using live eels to relieve constipation, and licking a patient's head to diagnose Cystic Fibrosis.

Host: Maurice Pickard, MD

STDs are widespread in all walks of life, regardless of gender, race, social status, or education. Seduced into complacency by the notion that "it can't happen to me" many sexually active teens and young adults are stunned when they are diagnosed with an STD.

In Seductive Delusions: How Everyday People Catch STDs, author and physician Dr. Jill Grimes reveals the truths about sexually transmitted diseases through narrated accounts of young men and women, their exam room conversations with doctors, and both the physical symptoms and the emotional reactions that can accompany infection.

Host: John Russell, MD

After having a nationally televised panic attack, Dan Harris, co-anchor of “Nightline” and the weekend edition of “Good Morning America” on ABC News, knew he had to make some changes. Mr. Harris realized that the source of his problems was the very thing he always thought was his greatest asset: the incessant, insatiable voice in his head, which had propelled him through the ranks of a hypercompetitive business, but had also led him to make decisions that provoked his on-air panic attack.

Eventually Harris stumbled upon an effective way to rein in that voice, something he always assumed to be either impossible or useless: meditation, a tool that research suggests can do everything from lower your blood pressure to essentially rewire your brain.

10% Happier, an autobiographical account of Harris's discovery of meditation, takes readers on a ride from the outer reaches of neuroscience to the inner sanctum of network news to the bizarre fringes of America’s spiritual scene, leaving takeaway for readers to make meaningful changes in their lives.

Host: Maurice Pickard, MD

Dr. Maurice Pickard speaks with psychologist Dr. Bernard Golden, an anger management specialist and author of Overcoming Destructive Anger: Strategies That Work.

Dr. Golden draws on both compassion-focused therapy―a model for change that encompasses and expands on cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness, and practices in compassion and self-compassion―and theories of emotional intelligence to offer concrete tools for turning destructive anger into healthy anger. This in turn can have positive health effects on a range of disease states, from cardiovascular disease to diabetes to depression.

Bernard Golden, PhD has been a practicing psychologist for almost forty years. He specializes in working with children, teens and adults on anger management issues, utilizing cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness techniques and practices in compassion and self-compassion. Dr. Golden is the author of Overcoming Destructive Anger: Strategies That Work (John Hopkins University Press, 2016), which teaches readers to recognize, sit with, and move beyond the triggers that cause destructive anger. Emphasizing anger’s link to the old brain (limbic cortex) and habits of mind, Dr. Golden offers multiple strategies for engaging the “rational brain” (prefrontal cortex) to overwrite established neural pathways and form new patterns of behavior.

Host: John Russell, MD

In recent years, malaria has emerged as a cause celebre for voguish philanthropists. Bill Gates, Bono, and Laura Bush are only a few of the personalities who have lent their names--and opened their pocketbooks--in hopes of stopping the disease. Still, in a time when every emergent disease inspires waves of panic, why aren't we doing more to tame one of our oldest foes? And how does a pathogen that we've known how to prevent for more than a century still infect 500 million people every year, killing nearly one million of them?

In The Fever, journalist Sonia Shah sets out to answer those questions, delivering a timely, inquisitive chronicle of the illness and its influence on human lives. Dr. John Russell hosts this fascinating discussion about her book.