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Diagnosis, Therapy, and Evidence: Conundrums in Modern American Medicine

by Gerald N. Grob and Allan V. Horwitz

Rutgers University Press, 2010
Cloth: 978-0-8135-4671-1 | eISBN: 978-0-8135-4812-8 | Paper: 978-0-8135-4672-8
Library of Congress Classification RA418.3.U6G76 2010
Dewey Decimal Classification 362.1

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Employing historical and contemporary data and case studies, the authors also examine tonsillectomy, cancer, heart disease, anxiety, and depression, and identify differences between rhetoric and reality and the weaknesses in diagnosis and treatment.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Gerald N. Grob is the Henry E. Sigerist Professor of the History of Medicine Emeritus in the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research at Rutgers University. He has written extensively, including The Dilemma of Federal Mental Health Policy: Radical Reform or Incremental Change? (Rutgers University Press).

Allan V. Horwitz is a professor of sociology and dean for social and behavioral sciences at Rutgers University and the coauthor of The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Ordinary Misery into Depressive Disorder.

REVIEWS

"This book deserves to be in the libraries of medical schools and schools of public health. Recommended."

— Choice

"Through a series of fascinating cases, Grob and Horwitz show how the diagnostic and treatment rhetoric of medicine and psychiatry often far exceeds the scientific evidence. A significant contribution to our understanding of medicalization."

— Peter Conrad, Brandeis University

"Medical historian Gerald Grob and medical sociologist Alan Horwitz provide an important and carefully crafted interdisciplinary analysis of how numerous therapies are introduced into clinical practice in the absence of clear and compelling data and kept alive by a combination of faith, analogy, tradition, ideology, inertia, and politics."

— Journal of the History of Medicine

"This book is an outstanding collection of highly informative and well-written chapters that aim to provide the reader with an understanding of the complexities of diagnosis and treatment in some important chronic diseases, from peptic ulcers to post-traumatic stress disorder. The authors bring together into one book a variety of medical conditions that have been discussed in different places, allowing a rich comparison of their similarities and differences."

— William Rothstein, professor of sociology, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

"The case study structure of the book nicely reflects the authors' disciplinary interests and is justified by the burden of their argument—which turns on the complex and contingent nature of the historical and sociological processes through which diseases are defined and managed."

— Charles Rosenberg, author of Our Present Complaint: American Medicine, Then and Now

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface
List of Abbreviations
Chapter 1 Rhetoric and Reality in Modern American Medicine
Chapter 2 Medical Rivalry and Etiological Speculation
Chapter 3 How Theory Makes Bad Practice
Chapter 4 How Science Tries to Explain Deadly Diseases
Chapter 5 Transforming Amorphous Stress into Discrete Disorders
Chapter 6 Creating Consensus From Diagnostic Confusion
Chapter 7 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Where Do We Go From Here?

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