Who says book lists are overdone? Well, I do. But wait, if you’re like me, you also love a good book cover grid (check) and chance to say to yourself, “I’ve read 2 of these books— crushing it.” Well, my kidney caring friends, urine luck.
But also, books can be daunting. They take too long to read and digest. Instead, why not spend 15 or 30 minutes watching or listening to delightful, well-produced takes on top issues in kidney care? Again, I’m here for you (see the last section).
Though the theme of today’s list is kidney-forward, it also contains gems on the broader themes of patient experience, leadership, transplantation, mortality and American healthcare, for better and worse.
Without further ado, less writing and more reading…
CONTENTS
Current Events
1. How to Make a Killing: Blood, Death and Dollars in American Medicine
By
Summary: Six decades ago, visionary doctors achieved the impossible: the humble kidney, acknowledged since ancient times to be as essential to life as the heart, became the first human organ to be successfully replaced with a machine. Yet huge dialysis corporations, ambitious doctor-entrepreneurs, and Beltway lobbyists soon turned this medical miracle into an early experiment in for-profit medicine—and one of the nation's worst healthcare catastrophes.
How to Make a Killing reveals dialysis as a microcosm of American medicine and poses a vital challenge: find a way to fix dialysis, and we'll have a fighting chance of fixing our country's dysfunctional healthcare system as a whole, restoring patients, not profits, as its true purpose.
2. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
By Atul Gawande, MD
Summary: In Being Mortal, best-selling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit.
3. Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health
By Anupam Jena, MD, PhD & Christopher Worsham, MD
Summary: Does timing, circumstance, or luck impact your health care? This groundbreaking book reveals the hidden side of medicine and how unexpected—but predictable—events can profoundly affect our health. Is there ever a good time to have a heart attack? Why do kids born in the summer get diagnosed more often with A.D.H.D.? How are marathons harmful for your health, even when you're not running?
As a University of Chicago–trained economist and Harvard medical school professor and doctor, Anupam Jena is uniquely equipped to answer these questions. And as a critical care doctor at Massachusetts General who researches health care policy, Christopher Worsham confronts their impact on the hospital’s sickest patients. In this singular work of science and medicine, Jena and Worsham show us how medicine really works, and its effect on all of us.
4. The People's Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine
By Ricardo Nuila
Summary: This ‘compelling mixture of health care policy and gripping stories from the frontlines of medicine’ (The Guardian) explores the question: where does an uninsured person go when turned away by hospitals, clinics, and doctors?
Here, we follow the lives of five uninsured Houstonians as their struggle for survival leads them to a hospital that prioritizes people over profit.
Memoirs
5. When Death Becomes Life: Notes from a Transplant Surgeon
By Joshua Mezrich, MD
Summary: A gifted surgeon illuminates one of the most profound, awe-inspiring, and deeply affecting achievements of modern day medicine—the movement of organs between bodies—in this exceptional work of death and life that takes its place besides Atul Gawande’s Complications, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies, and Jerome Groopman’s How Doctors Think.
6. Hundreds of Interlaced Fingers: A Kidney Doctor's Search for the Perfect Match
By Vanessa Grubbs, MD
Summary: A young, hopeful doctor’s memoir—an unforgettable love story and an informative journey into the world of medicine and kidney transplantation that ultimately asks: What does it mean to let go of something that you love, even if it is life itself?
7. The Misery of Dreams: Chasing a Dream, The Price of Pursuit, and the Lessons of the Journey
By Tarra Faulk, MD
Summary: In "The Misery of Dreams," nephrologist Dr. Tarra Faulk tackles the disillusionment and doubt that can arise after achieving a long-sought-after career goal. Drawing from her own experiences, Tarra provides examples and tools to help readers identify work-related and self-induced toxicity, diagnose and understand professional challenges and opportunities, and create a framework of help that offloads busywork and clears space for handling the tasks you were so skillfully trained to handle.
8. Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted
By
Summary: In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world”. She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.’
‘Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.
PS — If you like this one, you’ll love
9. The Calling: A Memoir of Family, Faith, and the Future of Healthcare
By Christopher Chen, MD & Gordon Chen, MD
Summary: A CT scan revealed Dr. James Chen, a Miami physician, had a cancerous, inoperable, tumor behind his nose. The prognosis was bleak. Dr. Chen had eight weeks to live.
James and his sons were suddenly patients, forced to look at the healthcare system from the other end of the stethoscope. They didn’t like what they saw—expensive, uncoordinated, and ineffective care. At one point James asked his sons, ‘If a family of doctors with connections can’t navigate this system, what chance do my patients have?
The Chens found their calling. Together with James’ wife Mary, Chris’s wife Stephanie (an attorney), and Gordon’s wife Jessica (another doctor) they created ChenMed, a physician-led company that serves the underserved. ChenMed puts their patients from forgotten communities first and focuses on accountable, compassionate care that improves health.
10. In Pillness and in Health: A memoir
By Henriette Ivanans
Summary: In Pillness and in Health sweeps its reader into the maelstrom of true love held hostage by disease. Dare to be devastated, over and over, by the relentless tornado of their story. Written with radical honesty, and startling wit, In Pillness and in Health shines new light in the dark corners of addiction and codependency, as we wonder how many devastating diseases can one marriage survive?
Innovation
11. The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
By
Summary: When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled The Double Helix on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind the competition to discover the code of life. Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn’t become scientists, she decided she would.
After helping to discover CRISPR, Doudna became a leader in wrestling with these moral issues and, with her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the Nobel Prize in 2020. Her story is an ‘enthralling detective story’ that involves the most profound wonders of nature, from the origins of life to the future of our species.
12. Curable: The Story of How an Unlikely Group of Radical Innovators Is Trying to Transform Our Health Care System
By Travis Christofferson
Summary: In Curable journalist and health care advocate Travis Christofferson looks at medicine through a magnifying glass and asks an important question: What if the roots of the current US health care crisis are psychological and systemic, perpetuated not just by corporate influence and the powers that be, but by you and me? An enthralling inquiry into a “Moneyball approach to medicine”, Curable explores the links between revolutionary baseball analytics; Nobel Prize-winning psychological research on confirmation bias; wildly successful maverick economic philosophy; the history of the radical mastectomy and the rise of the clinical trial; cutting-edge treatments routinely overlooked by regulatory bodies; and outdated medical models that prioritize profit over prevention.
13. Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity
By Peter Attia
Summary: Wouldn’t you like to live longer? And better? In this operating manual for longevity, Dr. Peter Attia draws on the latest science to deliver innovative nutritional interventions, techniques for optimizing exercise and sleep, and tools for addressing emotional and mental health.
‘This is not “biohacking,” it’s science: a well-founded strategic and tactical approach to extending lifespan while also improving our physical, cognitive, and emotional health. Dr. Attia’s aim is less to tell you what to do and more to help you learn how to think about long-term health, in order to create the best plan for you as an individual.
14. The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care
By Clayton Christensen & Jason Hwang
Summary: Our health care system is in critical condition. The Affordable Care Act has insured more Americans than ever, yet deductibles keep rising and costs continue to climb. Now more than ever, the industry needs a shot in the arm. It needs The Innovator’s Prescription, the now-classic approach to efficient, affordable health care.
Learn how to:
Deliver personalized care at a lower cost with “precision medicine”
Improve quality, accessibility, and affordability using a disruptive business model
Enable better treatment of chronic diseases through patient networks
Diagnose problems and find solutions faster using new technology
Take advantage of insurance and regulatory reforms to provide the best care possible”
Watch & Listen
Oh good, you found it. This section is for those who prefer to watch / listen to insightful takes and conversations on these topics. Warning: most of these takes are too spicy to be contained in the pages of books. Or published for that matter. Proceed with caution.
15. Organ & Body Donations: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
Aired on December 4, 2023
Summary: John Oliver discusses the systems in place for donating our organs and bodies, why those donations don’t always go where we might think they’re going, and which airline is the Greyhound bus of the sky.
16. Dialysis: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
Aired on May 15, 2017
Summary: For-profit dialysis companies often maximize their profits at the expense of their patients. John Oliver explores why a medical clinic is nothing like a Taco Bell.
17. The Promise of a Bioartificial Kidney (Should This Exist?)
Aired in December, 2020
Summary: UCSF bioengineer Shuvo Roy and his team have created the world’s first bionic kidney. The coffee-cup-sized device includes a silicon nanotechnology filter to cleanse the blood, while living kidney cells grown in a bioreactor perform the other functions of a natural kidney. A bioartificial kidney could save kidney patients from being stuck on a dialysis machine for life – or dying while waiting for a rare transplant. But is the promise of such a life-changing device enough to convince investors to bring such a thing to market? We talk through the ethics of artificial organs.
18. Sarah Hyland on Her Two Kidney Transplants (SELF)
Aired on December 10, 2018
Summary: "Modern Family" star Sarah Hyland sits down with us to discuss her first and second kidney transplants, as well as having to go through months of dialysis and a diagnosis of endometriosis (all while starring in one of the most popular comedies on television).
19. Pioneering Innovations in Organ Transplant Surgery (Innovatively Speaking)
Aired on August 14, 2023
Summary: On this episode of Innovatively Speaking, we interview Prabhakar Baliga, M.D., the Chair of the MUSC department of Surgery. We discuss with Dr. Baliga the growth and history of organ transplantation and what innovative techniques are being done today to eliminate inequities in the organ transplantation system such as bioprinting tissues and virtual cross-matching.
20. Both Sides of Organ Donation: A Discussion with Laura Reff, The Mother of Alin’s Organ Donor
Aired on September 18, 2023
Summary: In this episode Alin and Colby have an open and honest discussion with Laura Reff. Laura is the mom of Alin's heart donor Lucy. Tune in to hear about Lucy's story and legacy, being a donor family, the relationship between Alin and Lucy's family post transplant and much, much more!
Thanks for reading… about reading! Let us know what else you’re reading, watching and listening to in the kidney [space] in the comments below.