The Pursuit of Perfection: The Promise and Perils of Medical Enchancement

I've found the Pursuit of Perfection both readable and informative. I come from a family of MD's and let me tell you they're wound up about this book. (I withstood the demands for conformity and went into veterinary medicine myself.) My father, still a practicing GP in a dying Great Plains town whose patients frequently can't pay, feels that his public health orientation has been vindicated. A cousin in cosmetology in Dallas who specializes in liposuction and breast enlargement ... well, I couldn't adequately convey what HE thinks without using rude language. And another cousin in "drug engineering" rants and raves about how "Luddite" the arguments of the authors are but just sputters when you ask him for specifics. In fact, I finally read this book because I'd never heard this clan pitch in at each other about a book in a lay publishing house before.One of the reviewers said that no notice of this book had appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Isn't that just about fashion and big houses?

The authors do an admirable job of covering a wide range of medical techniques, whether these originated in new technologies which have outrun our society's poorly-grounded and tottering ethics or result from the greed of fumbling M.D.'s who shouldn't be trusted to repair a wheelbarrow properly. A swarm of negative reviews at this site suggest the authors are out to outlaw face reconstruction, etc. This is nonsense. Nonsense also to suggest the authors are not sufficiently expert in these areas. If anything, they are perhaps too scholarly for some readers to handle, in particular, maybe, the clodhopper who wants to protect his trashy trade and feels threatened by this fine work.

Pursuit of Perfection is a delight to read-- it traces as no other bookdoes the rise and fall of estrogen, which is of central concern to anywoman today. Indeed, the lessons it draws from estrogen-- how sciencewould not let go of it, how doctors allowed logic to trump data-- arerelevant, as the authors demonstrate to other pressing issues, growthhormone, liposuction, and even genetics. This is a must read for womenin particular, but men as well.

As a physician with an interest in the history of medicine, Pursuit ofPerfection strikes me as a prize winner. No book that I know of hastraced the history of endocrinology with such care and insight. Indeed,no book or article that I know has traced the history of growth hormonewith such care and insight. I hope my colleagues in the field read thisbook. It will not only educate them but may well prompt them to changetheir practices. The message here is to minimize risk, and it is onethat all of us, doctors and patients, must assimilate.