“This is an internal medicine didactic conference held in purgatory.”
You want to read a book that is so subtle in its acerbic analysis of treating populations as opposed to individual people. /1
You want to read a book that is so subtle in its acerbic analysis of treating populations as opposed to individual people. /1
Moving Mountains by @michelaccad is cleverly written as a dialogue between Socrates and Geoffrey Rose, a father of population health medicine that is likely ruining your life as I type this. /2
I liked the book so much I read half of it out loud in the evening to my family. My excitement and enthusiasm overshadowed their lack of enthusiasm about the fallacies of public health. /3
This graph rivals the thrill of cancer mortality in the US graph as an invitation to rethink what you believe about disease, medicine, and public health influence on disease trends. /4 
“The first duty of government in health promotion and environmental regulation is to protect the individual’s freedom of choice.
Every attempt to change our affairs for the better must of necessity impinge on that freedom because the aim is to influence what people do”. /5
Every attempt to change our affairs for the better must of necessity impinge on that freedom because the aim is to influence what people do”. /5
This isn’t Kafka. This is Geoffrey Rose who as Illich would say will “bomb you for your own good”. /6
“Population medicine is not only a utopian endeavor but a potentially dystopian one if it employs unjust means to pursue its ends.” @michelaccad
Do we see this unfold in front of us during the times of Covid? /7
Do we see this unfold in front of us during the times of Covid? /7
According to @michelaccad manipulation of population characteristics according to what public health experts imagine desirable “amounts to a confused hodge-podge of propositions that are untenable on clinical, epidemiological, social, and ethical grounds - or common sense” /8
Good part of the book focuses on specific issue of blood pressure and public health creeping into medicine that used to be about a doctor treating this person not applying population data to this person who may have nothing in common with population data. /9
Be on the lookout for Aristotle Solves the Conundrum of Hypertension by same author Michel Accad. /10
When I first ordered the book I was almost disappointed at the unclear name of the book. Now I am equally appreciative of how clever the title is to describe the process of moving statistical mountain curves of population characteristics. /11
Fun trivia. One reference was to Time cover magazine. I couldn’t believe it was 2014! I remember that cover well because I found it on my kitchen table in the morning. It was strategically paced there to get me on my usual grumble monologue about experts. /12
Probably the biggest value of the book to me was not one but many challenges to some common “truths” that public health propagates and that I swallowed and accepted as “it makes sense”. Time to learn more. /13
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