A fierce, honest, elegant and humane debunking of the great fallacies that drive modern medicine, by the award-winning author of THE WAY WE DIE NOW.
Seamus O'Mahony spent many years working for the National Health Service in Britain. He now lives and practises medicine in his native Cork, in the south of Ireland. His acclaimed first book, The Way We Die Now, was published in 2016, and has been translated into Swedish and Japanese. It won a BMA Book Award in 2017.
A deeply fascinating and rousing book
*Mail on Sunday*
What makes this book a delightful, if unsettling read, is not just
O'Mahony's scholarly and witty prose, but also his brutal
honesty... [He] is a wise consultant towards the end of his career
telling us what he wished he had known at the beginning'
*The Times*
An exceptionally strong polemic – one that might even persuade
Miley Cyrus to start eating wheat again
*Sunday Business Post*
This systemic perversion of science and its method might the most
obvious instance of the corruption O'Mahoney describes, but he
casts his net much wider. He also considers, inter alia, the
invention of pseudo-diseases, the connivance of the editors of
medical journals in increasing the volume of papers, an uncritical
deference to the simplifications of statistically-derived
knowledge, and the dishonesty of failing to acknowledge the limits
of what medicine can reasonably be expected to achieve
*Literary Review*
[A] humane, knowledgeable and scathing book [...] about the
dislocation of medical priorities from the basics of human need
*The Tablet*
[A] grounded and readable work... Very amusing in parts and
identifies real problems. Each chapter stands on its own, and the
book can be taken up at will, without losing the thread'
*Irish Independent*
Prof Seamus O'Mahony is highly critical of the medical system,
particularly when it comes to spending huge amounts of money on
drugs that do little to prolong life
*Irish Examiner*
A good book challenges the reader, this book certainly challenged
me but I feel better for engaging with this plausible and readable
criticism of contemporary medicine
*British Journal of General Practice*
A very interesting book... [O'Mahony] does make some very
interesting points about the limits to medicine and the ability of
medicine to cure every ailment'
*Northern Standard.*
A book on health that everyone should read this year... A
fascinating read for patients, medics and anyone who cares... If
there is a cure for the travails of our health service, and I
remain doubter-in-chief, it must begin with these odorous and
painful truths, unearthed and so skilfully dissected out in very
readable prose by Professor O'Mahony'
*Sunday Independent (Dublin).*
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