The Pursuit of Perfection
The Promise and Perils of Medical Enchancement
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
What does it mean to live in a time when medical science can not only cure the human body but also reshape it? How should we as individuals and as a society respond to new drugs and genetic technologies? Sheila and David Rothman address these questions with a singular blend of history and analysis, taking us behind the scenes to explain how scientific research, medical practice, drug company policies, and a quest for peak performance combine to exaggerate potential benefits and minimize risks. They present a fascinating and factual story from the rise of estrogen and testosterone use in the 1920s and 1930s to the frenzy around liposuction and growth hormone to the latest research into the genetics of aging. The Rothmans reveal what happens when physicians view patients’ unhappiness and dissatisfaction with their bodies—short stature, thunder thighs, aging—as though they were diseases to be treated.
The Pursuit of Perfection takes us from the early days of endocrinology (the belief that you are your hormones) to today’s frontier of genetic enhancements (the idea that you are your genes). It lays bare the always complicated and sometimes compromised positions of science, medicine, and commerce. This is the book to read before signing on for the latest medical fix.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This thoughtful but inconclusive book sends a mixed message as to whether it's the proper role of doctors to medicate or perform surgery on patients whose only medical complaint is unhappiness or inconvenience. Professors, respectively, of public health and of social medicine and history at Columbia University, Sheila Rothman and David Rothman consider the various uses of estrogen, testosterone, human growth hormone, liposuction and genetic manipulation, showing that these options have from the beginning blurred the line between cure and enhancement. Focusing heavily on how pharmaceutical corporations and physicians profit in the promotion of enhancement therapies, the authors argue that products were marketed to the public without due attention to their possible risks and that studies questioning their benefits and citing related health hazards have been consistently downplayed. At the same time, however, they acknowledge that consumers continue to demand enhancement therapies even when risks are known. Liposuction, for example, has become the most commonly performed plastic surgery, despite a "startling" mortality rate of one in 5,000. Since there is "no consensus on the meaning of enhancing the body" and because consumers perceive liposuction as easy and desirable, the procedure is here to stay. The prose is dry, and there's a shortage of interesting medical case histories, but the book ends with an intelligent exploration of how genetic research could lead to procedures that would double existing life spans. Admitting the serious ethical reservations such a possibility raises even among physicians themselves, the authors end on a disappointingly equivocal note: "Yes, there will be risks but just imagine enjoying the benefits of an extra seventy years." Photos not seen by PW.
