Beyond Second Opinions: Rethinking Questions about Fertility by Judith Steinberg Turiel Purchase at:  Amazon.com  Format: Paperback, 419pp. ISBN: 0520208544 Publisher: University of California Press  Pub. Date: May 1998

Description from Amazon.com

From Booklist 

This may look forbidding at first, but stick with it to gain a lot of information and pick up some useful approaches. Turiel salts the lucid text with summaries of medical and scientific articles. She stresses how careful the patient must be, since the government is more sensitive to religious and political noise than to constructively informing a patient, and the health-care system is primarily driven toward profit rather than the care of patients. Gynecologists, especially, are willing to go with fads in treating supposedly infertile women, often paying more attention to drug company releases than to medical and scientific literature, and tending to keep at a method long after its ineffectiveness has become apparent. Turiel shows that discussions between patients and physicians are often sales pitches rather than attempts to provide information, so she gives questions for a patient to ask herself, her doctor, and her surgeon to clarify what each really wants to do. Consider this a landmark book in its field. William Beatty --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Description from BarnesandNoble.com

Annotation 

Beyond Second Opinions is both an exposé of the risks, errors, and distortions surrounding fertility medicine and an authoritative guide for people seeking treatment. Accessible, comprehensive, and extremely well-informed, this book takes the reader beyond hype to the hard data on diagnoses and treatments. Judith Steinberg Turiel, a consumer health activist and herself a veteran of fertility treatments, uses the most up-to-date medical literature to shed new light on difficult decisions patients face today and on reproductive questions society must begin to address now. Those who are seeking a more balanced perspective to help them make better, more informed decisions will find a wealth of information about current reproductive interventions‹from simple fertility pills to dazzling experimental options‹as well as a discussion of the non-medical forces (economic and political) that shape an individual's treatment choices and reproductive outcomes. Despite quantities of information showered upon patients, they remain woefully misinformed; some fertility treatments may actually reduce chances for a successful pregnancy and threaten a patient's health. Turiel looks beyond surface claims to the real information, often uncovering counterintuitive findings and sometimes scandalous revelations. She exposes a realm of unregulated expansion, unscientific experimentation, and recent scandal over stolen embryos. Weaving together first-hand accounts, compelling stories, a range of scientific information, and lively anecdotes, Turiel addresses the persistent gulfs that separate medical professionals and health care consumers. In the process she arms laypeople with what they might not learnabout infertility practices from doctors, patient education brochures, and the newspaper.

Author Bio: Judith Steinberg Turiel is a freelance medical writer with an Ed.D. from Harvard. She was the research liaison for DES Action, worked with the Coalition for the Medical Rights of Women, and is coauthor of Preventing Preterm Birth: A Parent's Guide (1988).

What People Are Saying 

"[An] An intelligent, insightful, carefully documented, and higly readable account of fertility medicine, opening this field -- the good and bad -- to public view. Anyone wanting to have a child...should read Judith Turiel's important book." -- Chief, Perinatal Services, California, Pacific Medical Center —Michael Katz

From Library Journal 

Critical evaluations of infertility treatment present a minefield for collection development; these works often assume that the reader has a theoretical orientation and not a real-life information need. In this much-needed counterweight. Turiel, a medical writer and infertility patient, not only examines the mythos surrounding infertility medicine today but educates the reader in accessing, understanding, and evaluating the medical literature that reports its results. Her personal experience allows her to remain sensitive to the experience of patients and families while reporting honestly and objectively on the state of infertility treatment in the 1990s. Hers is a compassionate guide to a confusing landscape. Highly recommended for women's health collections in public and academic libraries.--Catherine Arnott Smith, Ctr. for Biomedical Informatics, Univ. of Pittsburgh

Table of Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments

Ch. 1 Facing Infertility: Into the Medical Realm   2

Ch. 2 A Couple Decides: What Informed Patients Do and Do Not Learn   17

Ch. 3 Assisted Reproductive Technology: A Modern Fact of Life   34

Ch. 4 Experiments in Fertility: Mixed Results, Mixed Messages   68

Ch. 5 Fertility Medicine's Older Woman   117

Ch. 6 Of Mice and Men and, Especially, Women: Learning from Research Past, Present, and Future   150

Ch. 7 How Is Consent Informed?   184

Ch. 8 Protecting Patients: Work Enough for All   222

Ch. 9 Finding What You Need   260

App. 1. Useful References and Resources   301

App. 2 Finding and Using the Medical Literature   308

App. 3 Elements of Informed Consent   314

App. 4 Minimizing Fertility Problems   317

App. 5 Doctors and Diagnoses   321

Glossary   325

Notes   335

Works Cited   361

Index   387