Reading List for Antibiotic Resistance

Book Review|Before You Fill That Prescription, You May Want to Read These Books

By Abigail Zuger

NY Times, Oct. 29, 2019

Link to Full Text.

When antibiotics first came to market barely 70 years ago, they were clear evidence of modern medicine’s 
power. These days, they are equally potent evidence of its limitations. Experts warn that we’re entering a 
“post-antibiotic era” full of microbes that eat our puny drugs for breakfast while fomenting new infections 
that are as untreatable as infections were centuries ago.

The story of antibiotic-resistant infections is nuanced and complicated — not necessarily the easiest or 
happiest reading, but vitally important. All drugs are double-edged swords, after all; antibiotics happen 
to be especially two-faced, with benefits and risks intertwined so closely that using them courts disasters 
large and small — and so, of course, does not using them. 

To help you understand this area, here’s a reality-based, up-to-date “bugs and drugs” 
reading list.

Image from NY Times article

My Year of Concussions

My Year of Concussions

By Nick Paumgarten

The New Yorker, November 4, 2019

The first concussion in the year of concussions was delivered by the right fist of a man whose name I either don’t know or can’t remember. You could say it was a mild concussion, and I always will, but many experts say that there’s no such thing. You have a concussion or you don’t. You can’t be mildly pregnant. But a brain injury is not a baby. We know what a baby is.

This engrossing personal history serves as a useful introduction to the topic  of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) and concussions, especially those sustained in football, soccer, and hockey.  Link.

This Graphic accompanied the New Yorker article

After Great Pain, A Resident's Report

After great pain*, a Resident’s Report

by Brooke Peterson Gabster, M.D.

JAMA  Nov. 5, 2019

Free Full Text

Emily Dickinson wrote: “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.”  This sentence could introduce the remarkable essay by a resident physician that was published this week in JAMA.

During her intern year, Dr. Gabster was diagnosed with an aggressive osteogenic sarcoma.  Her insights into being a patient are instructive.  She learns that:

1. firsthand, straightforward is rarely the true patient experience.

2. In this fight for life, I need to feel connected to my medical team. I need my doctors to know my disease and the newest treatment options. I also need my team to know me as a person,  as a resident, wife, daughter, sister, and friend.

She tells us, “I do not want to die.  I want to finish residency, pursue my dream career in global health, start a family, travel the world with my husband, and be present as my parents age.

In this short essay, she says so much.  It will resonate with some of you.  One can only thank her for her wisdom and wish her well on her journey.

* After great pain by Emily Dickinson

DOES ANY OF US REALLY LOVE OUR PRIVATE HEALTH INSURANCE?

by Rachel Madley

NY Times, September 18, 2019

This is an important cry from the heart by a young woman with Type I diabetes. Ms.  Madley was diagnosed with diabetes at age 14.  “When I turned 19, I was kicked off my parents’ plan. I took out thousands of dollars in extra student loans to buy insulin and diabetes supplies. After the Affordable Care Act passed, I was able to regain insurance, a high-deductible plan that cost me hundreds of dollars for each doctor’s visit and insulin refill.”

Here is a link to the full text.

 Link to video. (may take a few seconds to load)

Donald Lindberg, 85, Dies; Opened Medical Research to the World

As director of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the world’s largest medical library, Don Lindberg digitized its holdings to make them freely available to scientists, physicians and laypeople around the world.  All of us benefit from his vision and generosity of spirit.

He fundamentally changed the way biomedical knowledge and health information is collected, organized, and made available for public use. “Lindberg envisioned the future of computers in medicine a generation before it happened,” said Robert A. Logan, a former senior staff member at the library who worked closely with him.

One of our readers, Virginia Tanji, a respected medical librarian,  personally worked with Lindberg. She writes:

Dr. Lindberg was a visionary. A lot of librarians were upset when he was appointed Director of the National Library of Medicine because he was not a librarian, but he turned out to be the best person for the job.

In 1976, when I started working as a librarian, only medical librarians who went to the National Library of Medicine for hands-on training were allowed to apply for accounts that allowed them to search MEDLINE for a fee.  Today, thanks to Lindberg’s vision, anyone on our planet can freely search PubMed-MEDLINE and even have access to many of the articles in full-text!! 

What has impressed me in thinking about Dr. Lindberg is how he always enlisted the very best professionals to implement the wide range of projects successfully undertaken by NLM under his leadership.  That strikes me as the hallmark of a true leader.

One of Lindberg’s last projects at the NLM, Native People's Concepts of Health and Illness, explores the interconnectedness of wellness, illness, and cultural life for Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians.

You can access the video production of NATIVE VOICES,  If you have 3 minutes, view Lindberg's introduction to that exhibit.