Normal at Any Cost: Tall Girls, Short Boys, and the Medical Industry's Quest to Manipulate Height

This is a wonderful book. It's well-researched and documented. (Index! Foot notes!) It covers a little known area of medicine which shines a klieg light on the way the medical-industrial-marketing complex operates and the way government grants wishes to big business. Shame on the docs, labs, drug companies and FDA review committees all complicit in foisting dangerous treatments on children for decades. The book is beautifully written and surprisingly compelling. I stayed up all night reading it. Thank you Susan Cohen and Christine Cosgrove. I want my book group to read Normal At Any Cost.

If you're still wondering how health care became so expensive, read this book. In this meticulously reported and gracefully written exploration of a nation's obsession with height, Susan Cohen and Christine Cosgrove show how fame and fortune became more important for researchers and doctors than the health and happiness of their patients. This is an illuminating look at the cost to society and trauma to the children when the medical community begins to classify even healthy girls and boys as victims of disease because they don't fit some constantly shifting perception of "normal." Billions of dollars have been spent and some patientshave paid with their lives.

This is an outstanding book which compels us to think about the appropriateness and unintended consequences of medical solutions. The thoroughness with which the authors researched the subject is impressive, and the ease with which the reader is drawn into medically sophisticated issues is a tribute to their abilities to translate terms and procedures into readily understandable concepts. The authors interweave reporting with the stories of those who were treated, about whom the reader soon cares profoundly; I was sufficiently riveted that I sometimes skipped ahead to learn how these lives progressed. The book raises important bioethical issues without being dogmatic, and presents impartial retrospective and current views on the decisions that were made. I took a day off work to finish the book, and strongly recommend it.

I didn't know about off-label uses of drugs until picking up this book, which is eye-opening and easy for non-science readers like me to understand. The whole idea of manipulating height is creepy. Now we're hearing about off-label use of ADHD drugs to gain competitive intellectual advantage. Where is this leading? To a race of perfect people? It's particularly scary because, as we learn in "Normal At Any Cost," the medical consequences may not show up until much later.

Every day we read another news story about how medicine or "big pharma" (the pharmaceutical companies) have influenced our lives or politics without us knowing and often without our best interests at heart. This book exposes how that influence plays to our vulnerabilities: All parents want the best for their children, and this book explains how dangerous hormone therapies were used to manipulate height in girls and boys for decades beginning in the 1950s, all in the interest of achieving the "ideal" height for both. This book is a well-researched and well-written "must read" for anyone with an interest in public health and science. It provides a glimpse of how power, money, and the human desire to manipulate our destiny may impact future medical treatments.