Make America Healthy Again
Lessons from a 50-Year Surgical Odyssey
Assessing and critiquing various aspects of the American health-care system, Make America Healthy Again is a piquing medical treatise.
Part exposé, part social science treatise, surgeon Charles Antinori’s provocative book Make America Healthy Again suggests specific ways to improve health care in the US.
Drawing on Antinori’s medical background, the book assesses and critiques various aspects of the American health-care system. Working with people from a variety of socioeconomic groups, he learned that the emergency room is often used for urgent care instead of actual emergencies. Indeed, the book describes the kind of ailments that bring patients to the hospital—situations best handled by primary care physicians—in addition to critiquing issues like overtesting, which it says taxes the system. Also criticized is litigation against doctors following procedures, which is said to compromise the care they give to patients, making surgeons wary of executing their work. The book cites, as an example, orthopedic surgeons who stopped doing spinal surgery because of the risk of litigation.
Beyond these complaints, the book also finds room to praise medical advancements like the computerization of medical records, which it asserts improves patient care across institutions. Still, it says, such sharing can complicate processing and diagnoses too. It intones that exhausted professionals are expected to spend hours updating records at the end of the day: “About half [their] time is spent on the computer and the rest on administrative chores.” In the face of such challenges, it forwards specific ideas for how the situation might be improved, including the creation of a constitutional amendment limiting litigation and the formation of a jury pool, composed of a panel of experts, mandated to handle malpractice cases.
Much of this work is quite personalized, though, as with a colorful, revealing chapter about a doctor with whom Antinori did much of his significant surgical training. A demanding mentor, the man was known for saying to his residents, “When we want your opinion, we will give it to you.” More broadly compelling are the research-based chapters that catalog recent technological contributions to the medical industry, covering devices including surgical robots, cardiac defibrillators, ECMO machines, and pacemakers.
Still, the book’s focus is diffuse. One chapter is devoted to simple steps, including diet, exercise, and reducing cigarette and alcohol use, to nurture one’s health, used to complement the notion that “most of America’s health problems are self-inflicted.” Its advice is too familiar, and it represents a significant tonal deviation from the rest of the work. Further, the book’s opinions regarding gender-affirming surgery and immigration are off-putting.
Drawing on personal experience, the healthcare treatise Make America Healthy Again offers helpful prescriptions for improving the nation’s medical systems.
Reviewed by
Caroline Goldberg Igra
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
