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Category: Reviews
June 22, 2019
The title of Peter Gøtzsche’s recent book, Death of a
whistleblower and Cochrane’s moral collapse, forewarns
readers they are about to embark on the telling of one side
of an argument. Nonetheless, the book provides an important
perspective on an episode that may stand as a landmark
setback ...
December 15, 2018
As a public health practitioner in rural central India, issues of access to healthcare as well as cost, quality and equity issues have always interested me. Yet my day to day work has brought only a few aspects into sharper focus. This book caught my attention due to the interesting title and the...
December 05, 2018
"Wo bu shi yao shen" (Mandarin for "I am no God of medicine"), better known as Dying to survive, is one of this year's surprise movie blockbusters in China. Unlike the action packed, adrenalin-pumping movies that typically rule Chinese box office charts, this understated debut movie of director M...
October 06, 2018
The book Healers or Predators? Healthcare Corruption in India edited by Samiran Nundy, Keshav Desiraju and Sanjay Nagral is a compilation of 41 essays covering a broad array of topics of central concern to India's health system. As the title of the book suggests, at the core is corruption in medi...
September 14, 2018
The Global Health Watch reports originated at the World Health Assembly in May 2003 as an alternative to the "inadequate" WHO reports, which were found to be faltering in their response to the growing neo-liberal discourse and its consequences. The Watch was envisaged to enable a more people-cent...
May 11, 2018
Taking a cue from the author, I ventured into searching Amazon's website for the number of books written on ethics. To my amazement, I found more than 200,000 and out of these about 2000 were books on healthcare ethics. Robert Phalen has made an interesting addition to this list. The book is a "s...
January 01, 2018
The task of a book reviewer is to convey to readers the gist of the book and the reviewer's educated feelings on its contents. Where the reviewer finds a discrepancy or observes representations that cause apprehension, duty demands that these be pointed out. This is the basis for my using quotati...
January 01, 2018
The report Nuremberg betrayed: Human experimentation and the CIA torture program by the Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) describes the enhanced interrogation conducted by the Central Investigation Agency (CIA) of the United States of America on detainees, following the 9/11 attacks. The CIA's pr...
January 08, 2018
Sharon Batt's study of the relationship between breast cancer advocacy groups and the pharmaceutical industry in Canada is exhaustively researched, formidably detailed, analytically nuanced, riveting, and all too familiar. With over 50 pages of endnotes and an index of more than 30 pages, this bo...
October 31, 2017
The Marathi film Kanika, written and directed by Pushkar Manohar, has adopted a strange but effective approach to social evils like prenatal sex selection and sex selective abortions, without losing entertainment value.