“If you want to understand how the latest advances in genomics and AI can completely transform your health, and to translate this promise into practical tools that you can apply today, read this book!”—Mark Hyman, author of Young Forever

Taking us to the cutting edge of the new frontier of medicine, a visionary biotechnologist and a pathbreaking researcher show how we can optimize our health in ways that were previously unimaginable.

We are on the cusp of a major transformation in healthcare—yet few people know it. At top hospitals and a few innovative health-tech startups, scientists are working closely with patients to dramatically extend their “healthspan”—the number of healthy years before disease sets in. In The Age of Scientific Wellness, two visionary leaders of this revolution in health take us on a thrilling journey to this new frontier of medicine.

Today, most doctors wait for clinical symptoms to appear before they act, and the ten most commonly prescribed medications confer little or no benefit to most people taking them. Leroy Hood and Nathan Price argue that we must move beyond this reactive, hit-or-miss approach to usher in real precision health—a form of highly personalized care they call “scientific wellness.” Using information gleaned from our blood and genes and tapping into the data revolution made possible by AI, doctors can catch the onset of disease years before symptoms arise, revolutionizing prevention. Current applications have shown startling results: diabetes reversed, cancers eliminated, Alzheimer’s avoided, autoimmune conditions kept at bay.

This is not a future fantasy: it is already happening, but only for a few patients and at high cost. It’s time to make this gold standard of care more widely available. Inspiring in its possibilities, radical in its conclusions, The Age of Scientific Wellness shares actionable insights to help you chart a course to a longer, healthier, and more fulfilling life.

Felicia Knaul, an economist who has lived and worked for two decades in Latin America on health and social development, documents the personal and professional sides of her breast cancer experience. Beauty without the Breast contrasts her difficult but inspiring journey with that of the majority of women throughout the world who face not only the disease but stigma, discrimination, and lack of access to health care. This wrenching contrast is the cancer divide—an equity imperative in global health.

Knaul exposes barriers affecting women in low and middle-income countries and highlights the role of men, family, and community in responding to the challenge of breast cancer. She shares striking data about breast cancer, a leading killer of young women in developing countries, and narrates the process of applying this evidence and launching Tómatelo a Pecho (also the book title in Spanish)—a Mexico-based program promoting awareness and access to health care. The book concludes with letters from Dr. Julio Frenk, her husband and former Minister of Health of Mexico, written while they shared the trauma of diagnosis and treatment. With force and lucidity, the book narrates the journey of patient and family as they courageously navigate disease and survivorship.

You’ve argued politics with your aunt since high school, but failing eyesight now prevents her from keeping current with the newspaper. Your mother fractured her hip last year and is confined to a wheelchair. Your father has Alzheimer’s and only occasionally recognizes you. Someday, as Muriel Gillick points out in this important yet unsettling book, you too will be old. And no matter what vitamin regimen you’re on now, you will likely one day find yourself sick or frail. How do you prepare? What will you need?

With passion and compassion, Gillick chronicles the stories of elders who have struggled with housing options, with medical care decisions, and with finding meaning in life. Skillfully incorporating insights from medicine, health policy, and economics, she lays out action plans for individuals and for communities. In addition to doing all we can to maintain our health, we must vote and organize—for housing choices that consider autonomy as well as safety, for employment that utilizes the skills and wisdom of the elderly, and for better management of disability and chronic disease.

Most provocatively, Gillick argues against desperate attempts to cure the incurable. Care should focus on quality of life, not whether it can be prolonged at any cost. “A good old age,” writes Gillick, “is within our grasp.” But we must reach in the right direction.

Susan Sontag once described illness as “the night-side of life.” When we or our loved ones fall ill, our world is thrown into darkness and disarray, our routines are interrupted, our deepest beliefs shaken. The modern regime of hyper-logical biomedicine offers little solace when it comes to the effects of ill health on our inner lives. By exploring the role of desire in illness, Eros and Illness offers an alternative: an unconventional, deeply human exploration of what it means to live with, and live through, disease.

When we face down illness, something beyond biomedicine’s extremely valuable advances in treatment and prevention is sorely needed. Desire in its many guises plays a crucial part in illness, David Morris shows. Emotions, dreams, and stories—even romance and eroticism—shape our experiences as patients and as caregivers. Our perception of the world we enter through illness—including too often a world of pain—is shaped by desire.

Writing from his own heartbreaking experience as a caretaker for his wife, Morris relates how desire can worsen or, with care, mitigate the heavy weight of disease. He looks to myths, memoirs, paintings, performances, and narratives to understand how illness is intertwined with the things we value most dearly. Drawing on cultural resources from many centuries and media, Eros and Illness reaches out a hand to guide us through the long night of illness, showing us how to find productive desire where we expected only despair and defeat.

Women have long needed a book devoted to their unique issues with diabetes. This up-to-date and practical guide advocates simple lifestyle changes that can help women reduce their risk of getting diabetes or, if already diagnosed, prevent the disease’s most serious complications. Every Woman’s Guide to Diabetes translates the latest findings from diabetes research into proven strategies busy women can use to stay healthy and gain control over an often overwhelming disease. The authors discuss the nature of diabetes, helping readers through the complex medical decisions involved in diabetes treatment. They highlight strategies to decrease the emotional stress and social isolation that often accompany diagnosis, and offer everyday techniques for managing blood sugar.

Key features include:

— Unique aspects of diabetes for women throughout the life cycle
— Timetable of recommended tests and check-ups
— Guide to medications with common dosages
— Charts to help organize diabetes-care tasks and supplies
— Time-management tips for better disease regulation
— Guide to contraceptives available to women with diabetes
— Review of issues critical to women before, during, and following pregnancy
— Advice for overcoming barriers to weight loss and exercise
— Plan for intelligent diet trade-offs while still enjoying meals
— Practical tips for planning exercise
— Strategies to avoid diabetes “burn-out”

Written by two physicians (one of whom is a woman living with diabetes) and an experienced medical writer, Every Woman’s Guide to Diabetes recognizes the power that women have in their households to effect lifestyle changes that will benefit themselves and loved ones, including their mothers, daughters, sisters, and partners. This power can reduce the toll of the diabetes epidemic.

The goals of health and human security are fundamentally valued in all societies, yet the breadth of their interconnections are not properly understood. This volume explores the evolving relationship between health and security in today's interdependent world, and offers policy guidelines for global health action.

This volume underscores three basic principles. First, recent developments in the changing security landscape present enormous challenges for human security and global health. Second, although the connections between health and security are long-standing, the current context of new conflicts, pervasive poverty, and accelerating global flows has brought the fields closer together. Finally, a human security approach dependent upon individual and collective action can identify new strategies for meeting the goals of global health and security.

The distinguished contributions to this volume were commissioned by Harvard University's Global Equity Initiative, a research unit supporting the work of the International Commission on Human Security.

If we can decode the human genome and fashion working machines out of atoms, why can't we navigate the quagmire that is our health care system? In this important new book, Julius Richmond and Rashi Fein recount the fraught history of health care in America since the 1960s. After the advent of Medicare and Medicaid and with the progressive goal to make advances in medical care available to all, medical costs began their upward spiral. Cost control measures failed and led to the HMO revolution, turning patients into consumers and doctors into providers. The swelling ranks of Americans without any insurance at all dragged the United States to the bottom of the list of industrialized nations.

Over the last century medical education was also profoundly transformed into today's powerful triumvirate of academic medical centers, schools of medicine and public health, and research programs, all of which have shaped medical practice and medical care. The authors show how the promises of medical advances have not been matched either by financing or by delivery of care.

As a new crisis looms, and the existing patchwork of insurance is poised to unravel, American leaders must again take up the question of health care. This book brings the voice of reason and the promise of compromise to that debate.

By the millennium Americans were spending more than 12 billion dollars yearly on antidepressant medications. Currently, millions of people in the U.S. routinely use these pills. Are these miracle drugs, quickly curing depression? Or is their popularity a sign that we now inappropriately redefine normal life problems as diseases? Are they prescribed too often or too seldom? How do they affect self-images?

David Karp approaches these questions from the inside, having suffered from clinical depression for most of his adult life. In this book he explores the relationship between pills and personhood by listening to a group of experts who rarely get the chance to speak on the matter--those who are taking the medications. Their voices, extracted from interviews Karp conducted, color the pages with their experiences and reactions--humor, gratitude, frustration, hope, and puzzlement. Here, the patients themselves articulate their impressions of what drugs do to them and for them. They reflect on difficult issues, such as the process of becoming committed to medication, quandaries about personal authenticity, and relations with family and friends.

The stories are honest and vivid, from a distraught teenager who shuns antidepressants while regularly using street drugs to a woman who still yearns for a spiritual solution to depression even after telling intimates "I'm on Prozac and it's saving me." The book provides unflinching portraits of people attempting to make sense of a process far more complex and mysterious than doctors or pharmaceutical companies generally admit.

Just Care is Akemi Nishida’s thoughtful examination of care injustice and social justice enabled through care. The current neoliberal political economy has turned care into a business opportunity for the healthcare industrial complex and a mechanism of social oppression and control. Nishida analyzes the challenges people negotiate whether they are situated as caregivers, receivers, or both. Also illuminated is how people with disabilities come together to assemble community care collectives and bed activism (resistance and visions emerging from the space of bed) to reimagine care as a key element for social change.

The structure of care, Nishida writes, is deeply embedded in and embodies the cruel social order—based on disability, race, gender, migration status, and wealth—that determines who survives or deteriorates. Simultaneously, many marginalized communities treat care as the foundation of activism. Using interviews, focus groups, and participant observation with care workers and people with disabilities, Just Care looks into lives unfolding in the assemblage of Medicaid long-term care programs, community-based care collectives, and bed activism. Just Care identifies what care does, and asks: How can we activate care justice or just care where people feel cared affirmatively and care being used for the wellbeing of community and for just world making?

How do smokers evaluate evidence that smoking harms health? Some evidence suggests that smokers overestimate health risks from smoking. This book challenges this conclusion. The authors find that smokers tend to be overly optimistic about their longevity and future health if they quit later in life.

Older adults' decisions to quit smoking require personal experience with the serious health impacts associated with smoking. Smokers over fifty revise their risk perceptions only after experiencing a major health shock--such as a heart attack. But less serious symptoms, such as shortness of breath, do not cause changes in perceptions. Waiting for such a jolt to occur is imprudent.

The authors show that well-crafted messages about how smoking affects quality of life can greatly affect current perceptions of smoking risks. If smokers are informed of long-term consequences of a disease, and if they are told that quitting can indeed come too late, they are able to evaluate the risks of smoking more accurately, and act accordingly.