32 books like Adverse Reactions

By Thomas Maeder,

Here are 32 books that Adverse Reactions fans have personally recommended if you like Adverse Reactions. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Dear Luise: A Story of Power and Powerlessness in Denmark's Psychiatric Care System

David Healy Author Of Shipwreck of the Singular: Healthcare's Castaways

From my list on medical treatments gone wrong.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been researching treatment harms for 3 decades and founded RxISK.org in 2012, now an important site for people to report these harms. They’ve been reporting in their thousands often in personal accounts that feature health service gaslighting. During these years, our treatments have become a leading cause of mortality and morbidity, the time it takes to recognize harms has been getting longer, and our medication burdens heavier. We have a health crisis that parallels the climate crisis. Both Green parties and Greta Thunberg’s generation are turning a blind eye to the health chemicals central to this. We need to understand what is going wrong and turn it around.   

David's book list on medical treatments gone wrong

David Healy Why did David love this book?

In focusing on her daughter, Luise, a mother, Dorrit Cato, in this extraordinary book captures all that is going wrong and getting worse in medical care today. Very early on you know what is going to happen and feel powerless to stop it. Maybe I feel this way so much because I see it happening every day. I’ve bought lots of copies and given Dear Luise to many working in healthcare, who have found it equally raw. If you only have minimal encounters with healthcare or encounters where things have gone well, you may find this story sad but think it a rare exception. Trust me, in mental healthcare today Dear Luise is the norm, and tomorrow it will be the norm for all of health.   

By Dorrit Cato Christensen, Peter Stansill (translator),

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Dear Luise as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

‘An unintended event.’ This was the bland phrase used to describe Luise’s sudden death in the psychiatric ward at Amager Hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark. She was 32.

Dear Luise is a mother’s deeply personal account of her struggle to ensure her daughter’s survival through 20 years of treatment in the Danish mental health system. It is an alarming – and thoroughly documented – exposé of the abject failure of the medication-based treatment regimen routinely imposed on vulnerable psychiatric patients. This book is also a poignant tale of love and hope, brimming with tender memories of the creativity, originality and wry…


Book cover of The Pill That Steals Lives: One Woman's Terrifying Journey to Discover the Truth about Antidepressants

David Healy Author Of Shipwreck of the Singular: Healthcare's Castaways

From my list on medical treatments gone wrong.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been researching treatment harms for 3 decades and founded RxISK.org in 2012, now an important site for people to report these harms. They’ve been reporting in their thousands often in personal accounts that feature health service gaslighting. During these years, our treatments have become a leading cause of mortality and morbidity, the time it takes to recognize harms has been getting longer, and our medication burdens heavier. We have a health crisis that parallels the climate crisis. Both Green parties and Greta Thunberg’s generation are turning a blind eye to the health chemicals central to this. We need to understand what is going wrong and turn it around.   

David's book list on medical treatments gone wrong

David Healy Why did David love this book?

Every so often, a masterpiece tumbles out of someone who has never written anything before and thinks they can’t write. Katinka Newman clearly didn’t stop to think whether she should include this trivial detail or leave in what she had just written about that person – the result is a book that hangs together perfectly. You know this is exactly what happened. You witness the extraordinary downward spiral of someone getting supposedly the best mental healthcare there is. What you don’t expect is how she escapes from near-certain death. Newman doesn’t quote any antipsychiatry people telling us how bad psychiatry is but her account of what happened to her is all the more devastating for sticking just to her story.

By Katinka Blackford Newman,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Pill That Steals Lives as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

While going through a divorce, documentary filmmaker Katinka Blackford Newman took an antidepressant. Not unusual - except that things didn't turn out quite as she expected. She went into a four-day toxic psychosis with violent hallucinations, imagining she had killed her children, and in fact attacking herself with a knife. Caught up in a real-life nightmare when doctors didn't realise she was suffering side effects of more pills, she went into a year-long decline. Soon she was wandering around in an old dressing gown, unable to care for herself, and dribbling. She nearly lost everything, but luck stepped in; treated…


Book cover of The Zyprexa Papers

David Healy Author Of Shipwreck of the Singular: Healthcare's Castaways

From my list on medical treatments gone wrong.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been researching treatment harms for 3 decades and founded RxISK.org in 2012, now an important site for people to report these harms. They’ve been reporting in their thousands often in personal accounts that feature health service gaslighting. During these years, our treatments have become a leading cause of mortality and morbidity, the time it takes to recognize harms has been getting longer, and our medication burdens heavier. We have a health crisis that parallels the climate crisis. Both Green parties and Greta Thunberg’s generation are turning a blind eye to the health chemicals central to this. We need to understand what is going wrong and turn it around.   

David's book list on medical treatments gone wrong

David Healy Why did David love this book?

In The Zyprexa Papers Jim Gottstein runs two parallel stories. One is a thriller covering his efforts to get company documents from Zyprexa’s maker, Eli Lilly, that reveal its hazards and how Lilly hid those hazards, into the public domain and his subsequent trial for doing so. The other centers on the mental health patients he spends most of his time helping avoid being given drugs like this. The patients, especially Bill Bigley, are the beating heart of this book. Their stories bring home the consequences for them of the documents Gottstein took such risks to make public. This is Eric Brockovich – except that Hollywood is too scared of pharma and too dismissive of mental health patients to make this movie. You’ll just have to read the book.

By Jim Gottstein, Bob Parsons (illustrator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Zyprexa Papers as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

On December 17, 2006, The New York Times began a series of front-page stories about documents obtained from Alaska lawyer Jim Gottstein, showing Eli Lilly had concealed that its top-selling drug caused diabetes and other life-shortening metabolic problems.

The "Zyprexa Papers," as they came to be known, also showed Eli Lilly was illegally promoting the use of Zyprexa on children and the elderly, with particularly lethal effects. Although Mr. Gottstein believes he obtained the Zyprexa Papers legally, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn decided he had conspired to steal the documents, and…


Book cover of The Thalidomide Catastrophe

David Healy Author Of Shipwreck of the Singular: Healthcare's Castaways

From my list on medical treatments gone wrong.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been researching treatment harms for 3 decades and founded RxISK.org in 2012, now an important site for people to report these harms. They’ve been reporting in their thousands often in personal accounts that feature health service gaslighting. During these years, our treatments have become a leading cause of mortality and morbidity, the time it takes to recognize harms has been getting longer, and our medication burdens heavier. We have a health crisis that parallels the climate crisis. Both Green parties and Greta Thunberg’s generation are turning a blind eye to the health chemicals central to this. We need to understand what is going wrong and turn it around.   

David's book list on medical treatments gone wrong

David Healy Why did David love this book?

For many, Thalidomide is like King Arthur – a story lost in the mists of time. Except, like the Knights Templar or the Holy Grail, it still lives. People are still trying to find out who made it, still trying to find out how it causes the birth defects and other problems it causes, and still trying to claim it cures cancers and Covid – which it might.  

In a scenario that takes the hitman’s ‘nothing personal, it’s just business’ dilemma to unimaginable reaches, through the 1960s and 1970s senior Nazis plotted with Israeli scientists to defend this drug. Like Chou-en-Lai’s 1970 comment that it’s too soon to know what the French Revolution really meant, it’s too soon to know how the thalidomide story ends, but it’s worth bingeing on this book, nonetheless.

By Martin Johnson, Raymond G. Stokes, Tobias Arndt

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Thalidomide Catastrophe as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"This momentous book is the first comprehensive history of thalidomide. ... It demonstrates how many thousands of victims could have been spared very late in the day if Chemie Grünenthal had taken any notice of the early alarms: ... [It] carries conviction by its scientific rigor, and the clarity of the writing. Fifty years after the deaths and sufferings, the thalidomide tragedy is marked by ... the odour of corruption and cover up." - Sir Harold Evans, former editor of The Sunday Times and The Times


Book cover of Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues

Anne Biklé Author Of The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health

From my list on microbiomes, gut health, food, and farming.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have always been enamored with the natural world and how it works. This trait, among others, led me into the fields of biology, natural history, and environmental planning. Even as I witness our species chiseling away at the planet, I find hope and solace. Working alongside the tenacity and resiliency of plants, animals, and soil microbes, I've helped landscapes as large as a river basin and as small as a garden come to life and flourish. Give nature half a chance and she can do wonders.  

Anne's book list on microbiomes, gut health, food, and farming

Anne Biklé Why did Anne love this book?

Blaser's was among the initial books I read on the human microbiome and it has remained a favorite. You receive the gift of another person's deep knowledge that unveils a new and significant perspective.

Blaser uses stories of his research and experiences to share the full ramifications—good and bad—of modern medicine with a focus on antibiotics. Against this backdrop he unpacks how altering the human microbiome, especially in childhood, is a likely factor contributing to chronic diseases later in life, from asthma and allergies to gut and metabolic dysfunctions. It's sobering. But, Blaser also lays out some key immediate actions to take in medical research and clinical practice.

By Martin J Blaser,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Missing Microbes as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

“In Missing Microbes, Martin Blaser sounds [an] alarm. He patiently and thoroughly builds a compelling case that the threat of antibiotic overuse goes far beyond resistant infections.”―Nature

Renowned microbiologist Dr. Martin J. Blaser invites us into the wilds of the human microbiome, where for hundreds of thousands of years bacterial and human cells have existed in a peaceful symbiosis that is responsible for the equilibrium and health of our bodies. Now this invisible Eden is under assault from our overreliance on medical advances including antibiotics and caesarian sections, threatening the extinction of our irreplaceable microbes and leading to severe health…


Book cover of The Waiting Rooms

Julie Anderson Author Of The Midnight Man

From my list on evocative stories set in a hospital.

Why am I passionate about this?

I write historical crime fiction, and my latest novel is set in a hospital, a real place, now closed. The South London Hospital for Women and Children (1912–1985) was set up by pioneering suffragists and women surgeons Maud Chadburn and Eleanor Davies-Colley (the first woman admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons) and I recreate the now almost-forgotten hospital in my book. Events take place in 1946 when wartime trauma still impacts upon a society exhausted by conflict, and my book choices also reflect this.

Julie's book list on evocative stories set in a hospital

Julie Anderson Why did Julie love this book?

Like Green for Danger, this is a more classic mystery novel, though it is also a dystopian fiction.

The ‘hospital’ in which it is set is a facility for the elderly, who, denied access to antibiotics, wait there until, through accident or nature, they contract an infection and are allowed to die. Yet much of the novel takes place years earlier in South Africa and England, before the antibiotic crisis when the main character meets the love of her life. How we have progressed from today’s society to the society described in the book is gradually revealed, as is the narrator’s part in it. There are also mysterious happenings in the facility.

This is a vividly told tale set in an all too believable near future with restricted access to life-saving drugs. I admire the clever conceit and the intricate interweaving of past and present and was caught up…

By Eve Smith,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Waiting Rooms as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Swinging from South Africa to England: one woman's hunt for her birth mother in an all-too-believable near future in which an antibiotic crisis has decimated the population. A prescient, thrilling debut.

'Combines the excitement of a medical thriller a la Michael Crichton with sensitive characterisation and social insight in a timely debut novel all the more remarkable for being conceived and written before the current pandemic' Guardian

'STUNNING and terrifying ... The Waiting Rooms wrenches your heart in every way possible, but written with such humanity and emotion' Miranda Dickinson

'Chillingly close to reality, this gripping thriller brims with authenticity…


Book cover of How to be Orange

Diane Lemieux Author Of Culture Smart! Canada

From my list on understanding the locals.

Why am I passionate about this?

I was born in Quebec, have lived in eleven countries, and speak four languages. In my 20+ years as an author and journalist, my goal has always been to create bridges between cultures and to tell stories that enable individuals to better understand each other. For me, a trip to a new country, no matter how short or long, is incomplete unless I’ve had the chance to meet locals.

Diane's book list on understanding the locals

Diane Lemieux Why did Diane love this book?

This is a guidebook on Dutch culture written by a long-time American resident of the Netherlands.

It is a quirky, funny book that, unlike many books that attempt to describe another culture, makes explicit the personal bias of the author.

This is clearly Greg Shapiro’s take on the Dutch, and his keen eye and sense of humour make this a great read for short- and long-term visitors.

I’ve married into the Dutch culture and chuckled my way through the book.

By Gregory Scott Shapiro, Floor de Goede,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked How to be Orange as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Gregory Shapiro – the American Netherlander – brings you a must-have alternative to the Dutch assimilation course. What is the true Dutch identity? Shapiro shares his hilariously clumsy assimilation into Dutch culture and blasts some well-known stereotypes along the way. The book includes questions from the real Dutch Assimilation Exam, whose logic Shapiro delightfully dissects to reveal the Dutch identity they’d rather you didn’t know. How to Be Orange includes a photo essay of the most awkward Dutch product names and is illustrated by award-winning cartoonist Floor de Goede.

How to Be Orange makes you redefine the Holland you thought…


Book cover of How They Croaked: The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous

Kim Zachman Author Of There's No Ham in Hamburgers: Facts and Folklore about Our Favorite Foods

From my list on children's stories for laughing while learning.

Why am I passionate about this?

I used to be a freelance writer for magazines, but my secret passion was kids’ lit. When I decided to become a children’s author, I wanted to write nonfiction that was fun to read, not the dull, boring books I remembered from my childhood. When I discovered the first three books on my list, I was inspired to free up my funny bone and write to delight. The second two books also showcase innovative formats and humorous writing styles. Reading nonfiction doesn’t have to be a chore. These books will have children laughing while they learn. 

Kim's book list on children's stories for laughing while learning

Kim Zachman Why did Kim love this book?

In my opinion, this book has one of the best titles ever! I’ve always been fascinated by old-timey bad medicine, and I wasn’t disappointed. Poor George Washington died of a sore throat, but alas, no antibiotics back then. The leading doctors in the country took turns treating America’s first president. They tried bloodletting twice, blistering (being bitten by poisonous beetles), and gave him toxic potions that made him throw up. After all of that, he was begging to die, and he did. This book is brilliantly gross and disgusting, while still being delightfully humorous and informative. Highly recommended for ages ten and up.

By Georgia Bragg, Kevin O'Malley (illustrator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked How They Croaked as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 10, 11, 12, and 13.

What is this book about?

This award-winning book for reluctant readers is a fascinating collection of remarkable deaths--and not for the faint of heart. Over the course of history, men and women have lived and died. In fact, getting sick and dying can be a big, ugly mess--especially before the modern medical care that we all enjoy today. From King Tut's ancient autopsy to Albert Einstein's great brain escape, How They Croaked contains all the gory details of the awful ends of nineteen awfully famous people. Don't miss the companion, How They Choked!


Book cover of A Street Cat Named Bob

Dion Leonard Author Of Finding Gobi: A Little Dog with a Very Big Heart

From my list on animal and human connections.

Why am I passionate about this?

Dion Leonard is an Australian/British ultra runner who competes around the globe in endurance ultra running events ranging from 100 miles to over 240 miles in some of the most extreme conditions known to man. He has numerous top 10 finishes in some of the toughest races on the planet. An international bestselling author with 5 books in over 21 languages; Dion’s story has been featured on CNN, NBC Today Show, Good Morning Britain, CBS, CNBC, ABC America, Associated Press, ESPN, Pickler and Ben, CCTV, BBC, and many others. Dion is an inspirational speaker, animal welfare advocate and raises money and awareness for animals in need.

Dion's book list on animal and human connections

Dion Leonard Why did Dion love this book?

A fascinating story about two unlikely comrades, who, in their own way, save each other. James Bowen, the Author, is a London street performer (a busker), who earns a living playing his guitar. He's a recovering drug addict, who struggles to stay focused and clean. Bob is a homeless Ginger Cat who James finds injured in his apartment building and takes to the vet. James spends most of cash-on-hand to get antibiotics to treat Bob's wounds, and this act of kindness and sacrifice is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. You'll come to care about them both very quickly and you'll really hope that everything turns out well for both of them. James tells his story in very blunt terms, about dealing with addiction and trying to turn his life around.

By James Bowen,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Street Cat Named Bob as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From the author of A Christmas Gift from Bob, the original bestseller and heartwarming story of the life-saving friendship between a man and his streetwise cat

'[Bob] has entranced London like no feline since the days of Dick Whittington.' (Evening Standard)

'A heartwarming tale with a message of hope' (Daily Mail)

'Reminded me how amazing having a cat can be' (Glamour)

* * * * * * * *

The uplifting true story of an unlikely friendship between a man on the streets of Covent Garden and the ginger cat who adopts him and helps him heal his life. Now…


Book cover of You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

Brian Elliott Author Of White Coat Ways: A History of Medical Traditions and Their Battle with Progress

From my list on medical history that changes medical perspective.

Why am I passionate about this?

As a physician, medicine is my job. But along the way, I wondered how medicine got to where it is now–like really wondered. I wondered to the point that I was reading the original treatises written by 18th-century physicians. I started publishing research on medical history and giving presentations at medical conferences. I’d like to think this helps me be a better doctor by broadening my perspective on the healthcare industry. But at the very least, I’ve found these books enjoyable and compelling. I hope you enjoy them, too!

Brian's book list on medical history that changes medical perspective

Brian Elliott Why did Brian love this book?

I remember watching my first transplant in medical school and wondering, who was brave enough to be the first for something like this? Hearing the stories of the medical firsts and the people behind them is remarkable.

What I found even more captivating were the costs incurred by the patients involved. In that way, this book widened my perspective on the patient experience as we continue to push the boundaries of medicine.

By Paul A Offit,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked You Bet Your Life as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From one of America’s top physicians, a “riveting,” “fascinating,” and “timely” (Nature) history of risk in medicine 
 
Every medical decision—whether to have chemotherapy, an X-ray, or surgery—is a risk, no matter which way you choose. In You Bet Your Life, physician Paul A. Offit argues that, from the first blood transfusions four hundred years ago to the hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine, risk has been essential to the discovery of new treatments. More importantly, understanding the risks is crucial to whether, as a society or as individuals, we accept them. 
 
Told in Offit’s vigorous and rigorous style, You Bet Your…


Book cover of Dear Luise: A Story of Power and Powerlessness in Denmark's Psychiatric Care System
Book cover of The Pill That Steals Lives: One Woman's Terrifying Journey to Discover the Truth about Antidepressants
Book cover of The Zyprexa Papers

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