Author Janice Horowitz covered health at Time Magazine for two decades and created and hosted Dueling Docs: The Cure to Contradictory Medicine for pub...

Health Your Self: What's Really Driving Your Health and How to Take Charge By Janice M. Horowitz The book is getting a lot of media attention. Newsweek gave it a five-page spread and PBS's Next Avenue (70 million subscribers) covered it, which was picked up by Yahoo News, MSN and Marketwatch. Janice Horowitz covered health at Time Magazine for two decades and created and hosted Dueling Docs: The Cure to Contradictory Medicine for public radio. DO YOU KNOW WHAT’S BEHIND YOUR DOCTOR’S MEDICAL DECISIONS? The practice of medicine today has become so convoluted, so gigantically complicated, that you are often reduced to the least important consideration in your own care. In Health Your Self: What's Really Driving Your Care and How to Take Charge (Post Hill Press, May 18, 2021) former veteran TIME magazine health journalist Janice M. Horowitz reveals the behind-the-scenes influences that compromise your health care every time your doctor writes a prescription, orders a test or selects a treatment plan. Health Your Self transforms you into a healthy skeptic, one who knows how to spot—and outsmart—hidden forces at work whenever you seek care. Imagine you go to a doctor and a privacy curtain is drawn. On the other side of the curtain, a cadre of players is passing notes, each angling to have an agenda fulfilled that will have a dramatic—and too often detrimental—impact on your health. For example: When a physician refers a patient to a colleague in a hospital, there’s a concealed influence: he gets a bonus. When a patient is handed unnecessary antibiotics at urgent care, the doctor could be bucking for a five-star rating on a patient satisfaction survey. Enough of those, he gets a raise. When a doctor has a CT-scanner in his office, he’s more likely to use it. On you. He’s likely trying to offset the cost of the machine, even if it means unnecessarily exposing you to high doses of radiation. Health Your Self teaches you observation skills so keen, that you can sniff out these background influences and know exactly how to navigate around them. Horowitz encourages you to keep at it, until analyzing, questioning, and bravely speaking up become second nature whenever you’re faced with a health concern. Doctors will respect you all the more—and you’ll wind up with the best care possible. Through relatable, real-life stories, Health Your Self takes you through the arc of your life, starting with birth, when doctors impose a hospital protocol called “active management of labor” that everyone on staff knows about, but not you—and ending in old age when you wind up taking medications that haven’t been tested on anyone in your age bracket. Each chapter concludes with What Can You Do tips, culminating in the final chapter, Take Charge, Take Care, that provides a definitive list of questions patients should ask themselves, and then, questions to ask out loud to their doctors. Horowitz’s nearly two decades of experience as a health journalist, along with her own experience getting hit on the back of her head and becoming seriously debilitated as a result, are what turned her into a healthy skeptic. With Health Your Self, she shares her critical insights, so you too, can successfully advocate for yourself, including: Importance of a Second Perspective: Don’t settle for just a second opinion, get a second perspective from a doctor in a different field altogether. For migraines, start with a neurologist, then try a pain specialist. For back problems, go to an orthopedist and then a physiatrist who specializes in muscles. The Power of Big Pharma: To extend their reach—and profits—drug companies aim their medications at large swaths of the population. They target all young children by turning fairly normal behaviors, such as trouble focusing, into a full-fledged disease, and all older women by throwing drugs at naturally occurring weakened bones when alternative approaches, or doing nothing at all, may also work. Understanding Doctors’ Motives: Physicians feel compelled to follow medical society guidelines, even if the research behind the guidelines is thin, or they don’t make sense for someone just like you, with your vitality, genes and all the imponderables you bring to a health situation. If something goes wrong, doctors can defend themselves with an easy rebuttal: “I did it by the book.” “I have an abiding respect for doctors, who usually go into medicine for noble reasons, but my book reveals what patients can’t see, what’s going on behind the scenes, and crucially, what they can do about it,” says Horowitz. “My goal is to share with readers medical stories about people, many of whom are my own family and friends, and offer concrete advice. By the end of each chapter, they’ve not only had a good read, they’ve gained a sixth sense about exactly what they need to do when they go to a doctor.”