On Being a Statistic Audiobook By Cairn McCormack cover art

On Being a Statistic

Living in the Maze of Autoimmunity and the American Health Care System

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On Being a Statistic

By: Cairn McCormack
Narrated by: Nancy Bober
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It’s about reaching for goals while the body is quietly, behind your back, sabotaging those goals. Living with a chronic, progressive neurological disease (MS), a geologist explores some of the confounding questions of our time. The difference between wellness and illness, the different, but complementary roles modern science and alternative traditions like naturopathy play in healing, the potholed approach to accessibility and affordability of health care in our great country, the role of resilience and opportunity in answering the time honored question each of us ask: "Just who am I?"

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Cairn nails it with her descriptions of the ways in which the US medical system is still so bad, particularly at diagnosing and treating chronic conditions and how the health insurance industry makes everything worse, while also acknowledging her part by remaining in denial and not facing the disease proactively sooner than she did. It takes a lot of courage to admit mistakes and even more to put them in a book.

Cairn’s honesty is what makes the book so relatable because we all make bad choices sometimes and ignore things we should pay attention to. This is the real story as told firsthand by a real person and a single mom, while she tries to follow her dream of becoming a working scientist in geology. It also has a lot of information that might be of use to anyone facing the same diagnosis. There’s no one best way to handle a disease that can manifest in so many different ways for different people, but there is probably enough overlap that Cairn’s story has something useful and relatable for everyone or anyone with an autoimmune condition and probably even wider than that. There is some humor as well, sometimes cynical and even sarcastic at times, which is my favorite humor. The narrator did a good job -- the only distractions being a couple of mispronounced words.

I was given a free code for the audiobook but was never asked to leave a review. That was all my idea.

Highly Recommend

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I'll admit that when I started listening to this, I expected it to be yet another lament about how Western medicine is killing us all, and we should throw out hundreds of years of medical science and turn to herbs and incense and chakras and crystals. (Can you tell I'm a skeptic?) I am happy to report that although the author does throw plenty of barbs at the way medicine is practiced and accessed in the modern era (specifically, the American model), those barbs are justified. Her story of how she has coped with progressive multiple sclerosis, and how broken the American health care system is, should be required reading/listening for anyone involved in policymaking. I would have given it five stars if she'd taken a little more care in explaining the differences between various forms of alternative medicine. For instance, homeopathy and naturopathy are more or less lumped together in a passage near the end, but these are very different things -- the former is pure quackery, but the latter can be one of the most effective ways to treat certain conditions.

The narration was excellent. This book has many emotional moments -- moments of anger, sadness, frustration and despair, along with determination and hope. All of those feeling came through in the performance, and the pacing was perfect.

Very thought-provoking

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