Patricia Wellingham-Jones — It’s Enough to Make You Sick is an important book that examines the current dismal state of healthcare in America and offers hope and suggestions for fixing it.
Jeffrey M. Lobosky is a neurosurgeon with almost three decades of practice in his field. This gives him both experience and a unique perspective for viewing the healthcare system which allows his well-off and well-insured patients’ excellent care and prevents the poor, uninsured and underinsured from sometimes receiving care at all. Started as a catharsis for his frustration with the expensive, exclusive system he worked in, the book grew into an overview of the entire healthcare system, its weaknesses (and they are many, as most of us recognize), and prospective methods for creating a better, fairer system for all.
His chapter headings are intended to provoke interest, e.g., The Politics of American Medicine: Show Me the Money and I’ll Show You the Problem; Crisis inAmerica’s Emergency Rooms: Take Two Aspirin and Call 911 in the Morning; The Great American Patient: You Didn’t Really Think I Would Let You Off That Easily, Did You?
Lobosky also covers the ranking of America’s health care system according to WHO (way down on the list), managed care, hospitals, physicians and their replacements, malpractice. His final chapter, where he offers some hope for healing the broken system, he titles Solutions to the American Health Care Crisis: My Wife Has Always Accused Me of Being a Know-It-All, So Here’s My Chance to Prove It.
I feel this is an important book. Although his frustration leaks through the writing, he covers the entire field in most readable fashion, helping this reader to finally, in one place, get an idea of the scope of the problem with its interlinking pieces. I enjoy the humor, sardonic though it sometimes is, that lightens an otherwise heavy, depressing read, and his final look at solutions he considers would help heal this mess of a situation contains hope for us all, if we have the will to try.
About the Author
Patricia Wellingham-Jones is a former psychology researcher and writer/editor with an interest in healing writing and the benefits of writing and reading work together. Widely published in poetry and nonfiction, she writes for the review department of Recovering the Self: a journal of hope and healing and has authored ten chapbooks of poetry.
