Science news and discoveries from Mass General Brigham
Bench PressBench PressBench PressBench Press
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Research
    • Brain Research
    • Heart
    • Cancer
    • More…

Your Summer Reading List Powered by Authors from Massachusetts General Hospital

By Rachel Bindman | Communicating Science | 1 comment | 17 August, 2023 | 0

Are you looking for your next summer read? Well, look no further! These books by Massachusetts General Hospital authors have you covered. Below, you’ll learn more from these eight MGH authors about their motivations for writing these page-turners. Also, take a peek at other books that mention Mass General, from non-MGH authors (we sure like some Easter eggs). 

Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health by Anupam B. Jena, MD, PhD, and Christopher Worsham, MD

Learn more about this book below:

Brief Summary

In Random Acts of Medicine, we explore the hidden role that seemingly arbitrary events and circumstances play in everyone’s health care.

The book focuses on “natural experiments” in medicine, where patients—by chance—are randomly sent down one pathway or another, presenting unique opportunities to answer questions we might not be able to otherwise answer.

Taking creative approaches to data to study natural experiments in medicine has been the focus of our research careers—particularly Dr. Jena, who is an internationally recognized physician-economist at the forefront of this field.

In the book, we explore the data in an approachable and easy-to-digest way to answer questions like:

  • How do patients’ treatments differ based on their doctor’s gender?
  • Are doctors’ decisions about heart surgery swayed by the same bias that makes shoppers feel as if a $4.99 price tag is significantly less than $5.00?
  • Why are school children who happen to be born in August more likely to be diagnosed with the flu or ADHD than kids born in September?
  • And does more experience in medicine mean that doctors make better decisions on behalf of their patients? 

Weaving together research studies—our own and others’—with bedside experience, we examine broader questions about our health and systems of health care, such as: What makes a good doctor? How do policies affect the long-term health of our children? In what ways are doctors helping or harming patients when their brains take shortcuts? And how can patients leave less of their healthcare up to chance?

What motivated you to write this book?

We wrote this book because medicine today is fundamentally different from what it was decades ago; there’s no denying that advancements in treatment have revolutionized the field.

But there has been a second revolution in this time as well: a data revolution—made possible by electronic health records and insurance databases—with similarly large impacts on medicine as we know it.

With these data, it’s now possible to study an enormous range of questions that previously would have been nearly impossible to answer.

By approaching the world of medicine from a new perspective, through the eyes of an economist and doctor, the healthcare system can be broken down just like any other system.

With its flaws and inefficiencies exposed, data can uncover hidden truths.

We started working on this book prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the harsh realities of the crisis served only to reinforce why these studies are so important.

Fortunately, we were able to include brand new research we performed while writing the book that sheds fascinating new light on our approach to public health.

What do you hope people gain from reading this book?

By the end, readers will be able to look at the world around them in a different way, seeing the events in their lives, including those related to their health and health care, as influenced by chance.

They’ll learn some of the ways in which doctors are humans, too—subject to the same biases and prone to taking the same mental shortcuts as everyone else.

These human flaws create opportunities to learn, at least when we look at data in the right way, giving us opportunities to improve our health and the care we give. Finally, we anticipate readers will be equipped to think of new natural experiments that are worth studying—and we’d love to hear their ideas!

Read More!

The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness by Robert Waldinger, MD, and Marc Schulz, PhD

Learn more about this book from co-author Robert Waldinger, MD:

Brief Summary

What makes life fulfilling and meaningful? The simple but surprising answer is: relationships.

The stronger our relationships, the more likely we are to live happy, satisfying, and healthier lives.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development is the longest longitudinal study of adult life ever done, following the same families for 85 years and continuing to this day.

Study findings reveal that the strength of our connections with others can predict the health of both our bodies and our brains as we go through life. 

The Good Life takes a deep dive into the science of human connection, weaving life stories of study participants with the principles of lifespan developmental science.

What motivated you to write this book?

I gave a TEDx talk in 2015 that went viral and is now the 8th most-viewed talk in the history of TED.

It was clear that people are hungry for what science can tell us about human thriving.

The book brings our findings out of the academic journals and into a form accessible to scientists and lay people alike.

What do you hope people gain from reading this book?

I hope they gain a deeper understanding of the centrality of human connection in human wellbeing, and how we can be more proactive in our own lives and in counseling our patients to strengthen our relationships with others.

Read More!

Bold Move: A 3-Step Plan to Transform Anxiety into Power by Luana Marques, PhD

Learn more about this recent release:

Brief Summary

Bold Move shares a tried-and-tested method to get you out of your rut and on the road to a more meaningful life.

Regardless of the challenges you’re facing, Dr. Luana pinpoints psychological avoidance as the root of untapped potential and shows you how to overcome it to move toward a bold life.

Dr. Luana understands anxiety.

After decades of research, teaching, and clinical practice, she realized that the coping techniques she learned from her mother and grandmother while growing up in tough circumstances in Brazil mirror science-based cognitive behavioral therapy.

Her path from adversity to success and fulfillment as a Harvard clinician and researcher has given her the insights and skills to help anyone navigate change, discomfort, and stress.

What motivated you to write this book?

I wrote Bold Move because I believe that everyone needs skills that are scientifically driven to help them transform anxiety into power and live their best lives.

These were skills that I learned early on from my grandmother and later came to understand were based in cognitive behavioral therapy.

In addition, my research for the past 10 years has focused on bringing skills into inner-city communities to help them learn to regulate emotions better as such I wanted to bring these skills to a wider audience.

What do you hope people gain from reading this book?

By reading Bold Move individuals will gain concrete, actionable, science-driven skills to help them regulate their emotions and develop cognitive flexibility.

In addition, people will learn how to identify their values and create a plan to live a values-driven life.

Read More!

Future Care: Sensors, Artificial Intelligence, and the Reinvention of Medicine by Jag Singh, MD, PhD

Learn more about this book below:

Brief Summary

Healthcare is in a state of transition.

Its digital transformation using sensors and artificial intelligence will change the way we deliver and receive care.

Future Care is a timely book providing fresh perspectives and new insights into why we need to become a part of this public discourse.

The soul of this book is centered on improving lives through forecasting and averting disease while providing well-timed interventions.

The book has over 25 patient stories that illustrate how the course of medical care will evolve.

It is written for a general (wide) audience inclusive of patients, clinicians, leaders, and anyone interested in their own health.

What motivated you to write this book?

I started writing this book a year before COVID hit us.

The pandemic then in itself catalyzed the whole process – not just for the adoption of new technologies, but also my writing this book.

As a cardiologist and specifically as a cardiac electrophysiologist, I had always been interested in innovative device technologies.

It was more than a decade ago, that I started paying attention to sensor technologies, especially those embedded within the devices (e.g. pacemakers and defibrillators) that I was implanting in my patients for a variety of clinical conditions.

I was struck by the downstream potential of remotely monitoring my patients through these sensors and then intervening early based on this information to improve their clinical trajectory and outcomes.

The true stimulus for the book came around the time I was leading the clinical operations of the Cardiology Division (this was pre-COVID), when I thought that we could do a much better job at providing patient-centric care and at preventing disease.

I felt that we needed to adopt virtual care and sensor technologies in our daily care of our patients.

We needed to move away from the conventional transactional practice of medicine to a more holistic continuous care approach.

I felt motivated to be a part of the movement to facilitate this change.

believed that writing a book across the broad spectrum of evolving technologies, may help readers to understand the essential components of delivering care in the future.

This primarily includes virtual care that is aided by sensors and powered by artificial intelligence with sustainable workflows.

What do you hope people gain from reading this book?

I am very excited about the future and how clinical care will transform over the coming years.

There is so much potential in healthcare towards becoming more accessible and equitable, not just regionally or nationally but globally.

Alongside this is the promise of medicine becoming highly personalized with improved clinical outcomes.

Every day I walk the corridors of my hospital, I feel incredibly privileged to be a physician and it is an honor to be involved in the care and harbor the trust of my patients. It is something I don’t take lightly.

Having the opportunity to influence the conversation on the ‘future state of care’, through my book is very exciting, and I do hope that it starts the dialog and accelerates our willingness to step out of our comfort zones.

Future Care will have a significant impact on how medicine continues to evolve. It will serve as a terrific guide for patients, caregivers, and anyone interested in healthcare toward the much-needed direction for the future.

Read More!

Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life by Suzanne Koven, MD, MFA

Learn more about this book:

Brief Summary

My book is a memoir-in-essays about my life in medicine as a woman.

I write about the joys and challenges of being not only a doctor but also a mother, a daughter, a reader, and a writer.

What motivated you to write this book?

There have been many wonderful memoirs by male physicians but I felt that the female perspective was less well represented.

What do you hope people gain from reading this book?

I hope most of all that readers enjoy good storytelling, that they feel engaged, informed, moved, and amused.

But more specifically I’d like readers to understand that though there are many more female physicians than there once were (more than half of American physicians under 35 are women) we still face sexism, lower pay, slower academic promotion, inadequate support during pregnancy, and other inequities that aren’t relics of the less-enlightened years when I was a young doctor—they’re still very real today.

Read More!

The Healing Self: A Revolutionary New Plan to Supercharge Your Immunity and Stay Well for Life by Deepak Chopra, MD, and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

Learn more about the final book of this trilogy:

Brief Summary

The Healing Self provides lifestyle advice on how to carry out a daily routine of  “self-care” to preserve and promote one’s health and well-being, particularly by managing chronic inflammation.

The cornerstones of our daily “action plan” for promoting one’s “healing self” versus “unhealthy self” are Sleep, Handling of stress, Interaction with others, Exercise, Learning new things, and Diet.

I have since summarized this action plan into the acronym SHIELD, which we implement at the MGH McCance Center for Brain Health, where I serve as a co-director.

The book also dives deeply into the power of maintaining a positive mental attitude and the strong influence of the placebo and nocebo effects on one’s health. The book also emphasizes the roles of mindfulness and the connectivity of the mind, body, and brain in maintaining one’s overall sense of well-being. 

What motivated you to write this book?

This was the final book of a trilogy, beginning with Super Brain, which focused on the roles of mindfulness and neuroplasticity in preserving and promoting brain health, and Super Genes, which described how your lifestyle and habits affect your overall health via programming of your genetic activity through epigenetics.

The final book, The Healing Self, summarizes aspects of the two prior books and how they converge on managing chronic inflammation to keep the brain and body healthy and enhance mental well-being. 

What do you hope people gain from reading this book?

In The Healing Self, we provide a lifestyle “action plan” for maintaining and enhancing one’s health and well-being at the mental, physical, and spiritual levels.

We point out that the word ‘health” is derived from the word “whole” and emphasize that health and well-being are enhanced by mindfulness, a sense of wholeness, and a positive attitude together with adherence to the six cornerstones of SHIELD.

Read More!

Lily Learns a Life Lesson: The Truth About Vaping and Drugs by Gleeson Rebello, MBBS, Helen Karimi, MA, MS, CNIM, and Nicholas Taylor

Learn more about this informative children’s book:

Brief Summary

Nine-year-old Lily witnesses the life-threatening repercussions of her neighbor’s vaping.

Lily’s mother teaches her about the consequences of drug usage.

Because Lily is equipped with this knowledge, she is later able to stand up for herself when offered drugs at school.

Lily Learns a Life Lesson: The Truth About Vaping and Drugs is an educational resource for teaching children about the consequences of drug use.

What motivated you to write this book?

This book is a form of early intervention.

It is important to inform children about the consequences of drug usage before they become exposed.

Growing up, Dr. Robello witnessed widespread alcoholism and knew there could be an approachable way to send a widespread message about the dangers of drugs and alcohol.

Writing a children’s book felt compelling since educating young people is a crucial way to prevent future drug use. 

What do you hope people gain from reading this book?

Readers can hopefully understand the importance of having a conversation about drugs with children in their formative years.

It can be difficult to initiate a conversation about this topic, but it is critical to include this as a form of education even for children at a younger age.

Read More!

Minding the Climate: How Neuroscience Can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis by Ann-Christine Duhaime, MD

Learn more about this book:

Brief Summary

The book is an exploration of these questions:

What is it about the way the brain is designed by evolution that makes the problem of climate change so difficult for us to solve?

And does understanding that help us overcome some of the barriers to working individually and collectively to successfully limit the causes and consequences of our environmental crisis so that we can maintain a livable future?

The book is divided into three parts – Neural Origins, The 21st Century Brain, and Changing the Brain.

It explores why we make decisions the way we do, how modern life interacts with our neural design to accelerate the problem of consumption and climate change, and to what degree our brains are malleable and can change what we prioritize, based on evidence from multiple scientific disciplines.

Finally, it applies this evidence to what we might do to help lean our individual, economic, and political decisions to more effectively address the intersecting environmental crises that we see worsening around us every day.

What motivated you to write this book?

Climate change is both an existential crisis and the biggest public health problem we face.

People who work in clinical neurosciences tend to look at the world through the lens of how the brain works.

Every day we see how normal function can be impaired by the conditions we treat, and how amazing the capacity of the brain is to grow, develop, function, and recover despite all the things we see that can throw obstacles in its way.

We also see the awesome power of the brain to perceive and analyze complex inputs along multiple dimensions and to adapt to staggering amounts of change.

We need to change our behavior dramatically to meet the challenge of the climate crisis – but why haven’t we done so already?

I was fascinated by how this crisis is shaped by the ways in which we are designed to make decisions and weigh alternatives based on millions of years of evolutionary pressure, going back to simple organisms and continuing to the refinement of homo sapiens hundreds of thousands of years ago, when the world was quite a different place.

Looking at the problem of climate change through that lens helped me have a better understanding of the nature of the problem and what we might be able to do to more effectively make the urgent changes needed to successfully address the crisis.

What do you hope people gain from reading this book?

The book may appeal to different people for different reasons.

Those who are interested in how the brain is designed to work will find some technical details that help shed light on why some problems are easier to solve than others.

What brain-related factors led to climate change in the first place, and why have we been slow to perceive it and sluggish in our response?

Those interested in the effect of nature on the brain, why we have such diversity of opinions among people, how we decide what’s important and our priorities and preferences, and what brain factors influence people’s political leanings may find some interesting surprises.

Those interested in the effect of modern life – 24 hour news cycles, age segregation, the effect of electronic media on children’s brains – will learn how these factors intersect with consumption and climate change acceleration.

Finally, those who want to know, “What can I do that will make the biggest difference?” – not just in their personal lives, but in their roles in the workforce, as leaders in institutions and communities, and as citizens – will find some useful information.

My hope is that by the end of the book, readers will have found something that deepens their understanding of the human brain’s strengths and limitations that provides insight into what each of us can do to contribute to a better future – not just for the patients we treat, but for ourselves, our families and communities, and for the world at large.

Read More!

Books that mention MGH, but are not from MGH authors:

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear

Anne Thorndike, MD, MPH, and her traffic-light labels and choice architecture are mentioned!

Read More!

The Five-Star Weekend by Elin Hilderbrand

 

In this fiction novel, one of the characters was a cardiac surgeon at MGH! They even mention meeting at Harvard Gardens just across the street from MGH!

Read More!

About the Mass General Research Institute
Massachusetts General Hospital is home to the largest hospital-based research program in the United States. Our researchers work side-by-side with physicians to develop innovative new ways to diagnose, treat and prevent disease.
Support our research

No tags.

1 comment

  • david a keith Reply August 31, 2023 at 10:16 am

    You might want to add Julia Buckley ‘Heal Me’. In search of a cure. The Author is a travel writer living in Venice who documents her travels around the world in search of relief of her chronic pian. MGH and providers are well represented. Ms. Buckley is also Board member and contributor to a new MGB CE program ‘Interdisciplinary Pain and Headache Rounds’ to start in September. David Keith

Leave a Comment

Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  • About
  • About Us
  • Brain Research
  • Cancer
  • Communicating Science
  • Contenido en español
  • COVID-19
  • Events
  • Heart
  • History
  • Home (OLD)
    • Disclaimer
    • Home
  • Just kidding!
  • MGH Chief Academic Officer Job Description
  • MGRI Image Awards
  • MGRI Image Awards
  • MGRI Science Communications Intern
  • Research
  • Research News Funding Opportunities
  • Research News: Announcements & Events
  • Science Slam Tips and Tricks
  • Subscribe
Bench Press