All of us will be patients some day. What can we do to ensure that we get the best medical care when we fall ill?

Information Therapy – the right information at the right time for the right person – can be powerful medicine! Ideally, with every prescription, your doctor should prescribe information; and in a perfect world, every clinic, hospital, pharmacy and diagnostic centre would have a patient education resource centre, where people can find information on their health problems.

This book explores how Information Therapy impacts all players in the healthcare ecosystem – patients, doctors, hospitals, health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and the government – and how it can help all of us. Information Therapy can help to heal a sick healthcare system – and everyone has an active role to play in making this a reality!

The author, very interestingly, in one of the chapter says: The trick is to make the patient do the work, using the self-service model supermarkets do, versus the old fashioned kirana shop. In the kirana store, all products are fetched by an assistant from shelves while customers wait in front of the counter and indicate the items they want. This is very labour-intensive and therefore also quite expensive. The shopping process is slow, since the number of customers who can be attended to at one time is limited by the number of staff employed at the store.

Supermarkets, on the other hand, make customers select their own goods and cart them to the front of the store to pay for them, so they can service a much larger number of customers by making them do most of the work!

Similarly, Information Therapy tools allow patients to serve themselves, so their doctor’s precious time can be used for more productive and empathetic patient interaction.

Health Biz India’s Take: The sleek 144-pager book is divided into 25 short chapters to make reading easy. Like the above extract, the book is filled with relatable examples from daily life for better understanding of the reader. Will surely make for an interesting read.

The author can be contacted at: info@drmalpani.com

There is a unanimous assumption that diseases of industrialization (diabetes, heart diseases, obesity, etc) are environmentally triggered, maybe due to the influence of western eating styles. This assumption leads to the widespread belief that major improvements in health and longetivity can be achieved by simple modifications of diet and lifestyle.

Maintaining adequate nutrition during various disease conditions and to prevent them in the first place is a major ordeal. The book we are quoting here is an attempt to provide an insight into the challenges associated with evaluation and maintenance of a patients’ nutritional status during and after a disease condition.

The book is divided into 10 chapters. The first 4 chapters highlight the basics of nutrition and teaches the reader how to judicially use the food pyramid. The next 6 chapters deal with the dietary management for people suffering from cancer, heart diseases, obesity, tuberculosis, diabetes, and those needing critical care.

The book also contains a collection of disease-specific recipes along with the role of diet in each disease in an easy-to-understand language. Guidelines and sample diet charts are also included for the reader to better understand the concept.

Health Biz India’s take: The book can be a useful handbook for nutritionists as well as families of patients with diseases listed here. The market has a lot of books with dietary information; but what is unique about this book is the combination of diet with disease conditions. Also, the recipes provided might prove beneficial to patients.

The author can be contacted at: shwetarastogi@yahoo.com