Positive: One Doctor's Personal Encounters with Death, Life, and the US Healthcare System
Michael Saag
Language: English
Pages: 376
ISBN: 1626340641
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A Memoir and a Manifesto
Positive traces the life of Michael S. Saag, MD, an internationally known expert on the virus that causes AIDS, but the book is more than a memoir: through his story, Dr. Saag also shines a light on the dysfunctional US healthcare system, proposing optimistic yet realistic remedies drawn from his distinguished medical career.
Mike Saag began his medical residency in 1981, within days of the Centers for Disease Control's first report of a mysterious ''gay cancer'' killing young men. Soon, the young doctor's career was yoked to the epidemic. His life's work became turning the most deadly virus in human history into a chronic, manageable disease.
In the lab at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Dr. Saag and colleagues made seminal early discoveries about the elusive virus. And at the AIDS clinic he founded, Dr. Saag met people whose fight against a virtual death sentence touched his heart and inspired him to work even harder. As his career stretched across three decades, Dr. Saag found himself battling another foe, this one almost as pernicious as AIDS itself: a broken healthcare system shaped more by politicians, insurers, and lobbyists than by patients' needs.
Positive is Dr. Saag's tribute to the unforgettable patients he has known and an urgent call to create a comprehensive, compassionate, accessible healthcare system in the name of those we can save today.
Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir
options. Because my mother greatly admired a hometown surgeon, Norton Waterman, she had always hoped that surgery would be my specialty. But I had at best marginal interest in cutting bodies open and having people’s lives so literally in my two hands. I wasn’t keen on having to report to work every day at 5:00 a.m. And I didn’t like the brevity of the surgeon-patient relationship: Surgeons were forever saying good-bye to patients, even those they cured. I also ruled out oncology for fear that I
in the book, GOMER was the staff’s acronym for Get Out of My Emergency Room, a label they applied to aged or incurably sick individuals who had lost the essence of meaningful life yet were still alive. My dad’s father, David Saag, died at age eighty, and after my dad reached that milestone himself, he used to joke, “I made a deal with God that if I could live to eighty, I’d be a happy man. At seventy-nine, I renegotiated!” However, my dad also had watched as his aging mother, Lela, lost her
profits. The disarray in the system creates cover for political untruths and payer inefficiencies while enhancing reelection for officeholders and building profits for insurers. The more chaos there is, the more politicians can obfuscate and payers can profit. Meanwhile, the public pays for the inefficiencies, picking up bigger healthcare bills than the rest of the developed world while enduring worse overall health outcomes. How do we pay for this extra cost of care for worse outcomes?
groups in which he and I both moved, that I recruited him for that role repeatedly. A former Navy fighter pilot, David was a natural in social settings, a handsome, compact man with a gregarious nature and a gift for public speaking. As David continued to battle the PCP, hospitals in some of the hardest-hit cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York—began offering patients a new therapy: inhaled pentamidine, an infection-fighting agent delivered via a costly nebulizer apparatus. David was a
clinicians including Margaret Fischl, Paul Volberding, and Doug Richman, whose laboratory was among the first to identify HIV drug resistance. Because we were going to address the clinical basics of using these new drugs—when to start therapy, what to start with, when to change therapy and what to change to—the symposium drew a big, curious crowd. Doug was at the podium, partway through his presentation on primary infection, when the doors of the venue were slammed open and the circus began.
