Jen Singer is an accomplished medical writer who wrote a book you can judge by the cover. This remarkable 78-page primer guides people through the transition from “healthy” to “sick.”
Singer provides just enough—and not too much!—medical and practical information. Her voice makes you feel like you are sitting in her living room, listening to her calmly and even entertainingly share invaluable insights and tips from her “40 years of enduring illnesses, both chroinc and acute, life-changing and life-threatening.”
Singer’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many more. She has survived cancer and is now living with heart disease. A mix of superb care, missed diagnoses, and her medical knowledge inform the approach she shares with readers: a healthy balance of self-advocacy and working effctively with the healthcare team. This combination helps optimize patients’ care and quality of life.
In the introduction, a brief recap of her medical saga leads to two truths:
Being sick is both an art and a science.
You need different things at different times.
Singer boils down innumerable ins-and-outs of illness to patients needing three basic things: Information + Logistics + Support. The book then divides sickness into four categories: Just Diagnosed; In Treatment; In Remission; and “Living With.”
As a physician-writer, I cannot overstate the difficulty of creating a short primer on a topic as expansive as illness, and to do it successfully in a world where people walk around with a firehose of information and advice spurting out of their smartphones. Indeed, given today’s easy access to an overload of unfiltered information, we need Singer’s How to Be Sick more than ever.
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