Your Life Depends on It: What You Can Do to Make Better Choices About Your Health

“After decades of research, I’ve found people are not fully capable of making good medical choices in the ways they’re currently offered,” writes Miron-Shatz, a visiting researcher at Cambridge University, in her informative if dry debut. Miron-Shatz admonishes “paternalistic” practices in which it’s assumed that doctors know best, and champions shared decision-making between medical professionals and patients. She encourages readers to “use every tool in your arsenal to learn about your symptoms,” discusses the downside to delaying end-of-life conversations (“it reduces patients’ agency”), and suggests ways to foster a good doctor-patient relationship (for starters, don’t treat doctors like gods). Along the way, she digs into the factors behind patients’ medical decision-making, such as confirmation bias, and investigates how choices are presented to patients (“Like so many issues we saw in health care, too much choice is a problem that institutions create and individuals are forced to negotiate”). She briefly covers why some patients fail to comply with treatments, and the effectiveness of telemedicine, but the survey prizes breadth over depth, and the statistics tend to overpower analysis. While Miron-Shatz makes a convincing case for patient self-advocacy, readers are likely to be left wanting. (Sept.)