Review: Health Tips, Myths, and Tricks: A Physician's Advice

HEALTH TIPS, MYTHS, AND TRICKS: A Physician's Advice by Morton E. Tavel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a basic health reference book with a twist. The author, Dr. Morton E. Tavel, MD has solid credentials, and an authoritative background as a practicing cardiologist as well as a medical school professor.

The book is arranged topically in short chapters within sections of tips, myths and tricks that discuss common questions that patients might want to ask of their physician. It is written in a readable conversational style as if he were speaking personally to the reader. Many of the topics addressed provide references to some scientific evidence, so that readers may follow up with further study if they desire to explore the issue further. The amount of scientific jargon however is minimal, and the answers are informative yet understandable.

There are 62 short chapters, and topics included are chosen from standard, common health concerns as well as controversies and hot-button issues. Some highlights are safe weight loss, trans fats and health, coffee, green tea, chocolate, foods to avoid, dangers of sodium, hypertension, red meat, fish, olive oil, red wine, the common cold, vaccines, second hand smoke, pain killers and sleep. Dr. Tavel addresses what he considers to be a number of myths, conspiracy theories, scams, irrational fears.

This could be a good general health reference book for the home library. It is useful for browsing, as opposed to using search engines to ask health questions because there is a large variety of information compiled here in one book.

I read the e-book version, and I do note some formatting issues. The e-book appears to have originally been formatted for the print edition and then converted to the e-book. without completely reformatting, which created some problems with navigation and visual appearance.

Another issue is large areas of blank white space within the chapters, which seem to be where the section/page breaks appeared in the original print version. This sloppy formatting detracts from the overall quality of the book in the e-book version. I have not seen the actual print version, so I don't know how it looks.

Beside these problems, there were some other editing and proofing errors, including run on sentences, poor syntax and errors such as advising the consumption of a quart of olive oil per week, which seems to be quite a large amount. I wondered why a chapter on polygraph tests was included.

All in all, I found this to be useful, informative book. While the content is good, due to the errors and formatting issues noted, I gave it a lower rating.


View all my reviews