Dr. Golem: How to Think about Medicine Book

Straight-forwardly extends the theoretical framework of Golem: What Everyone Should Know about Science and The Golem at Large: What You Should Know about Technology to medicine. The draw out the tension between medicine as science and medicine as succour, short-term and long-term considerations, and "population average testing" and "specific individual causes" to help study the issues. The various chapters deal with how The Placebo Effect complicates medicine, how difficult it can be to spot bogus doctors, tonsil treatments, alternative medicine, contested diseases, AIDS activism (reprinted from Golem at Large), and vaccine controversies.

The most interesting aspects of this volume is how the authors disagree (slightly, somewhat) on the question of vaccinations. The case studies are not quite as flashy as the ones in the previous books, and overall (As they admit) they move to be "more on the side of science in this book," making it somewhat less interesting a read, compared to the previous volumes.