Well: What We Need to Talk About When We Talk About Health

Review

"With Galea's narrative storytelling ... our national public health crisis feels fresh, raw, and urgent." -- Emily F. Peters, Health Affairs"A deeply affecting work from one of the important and innovative voices in American health and medicine. Well shows how healthcare and society are reflections of one another -- and how central human qualities like empathy and compassion must be if both are going to thrive." -- Arianna Huffington, Founder of HuffPost and Founder & CEO of Thrive Global"For 45 years I have fought for equity, compassion, and inclusion in mental health, so I am thrilled to see Sandro Galea's Well take the revolutionary and compelling stance that these principles can have a more beneficial effect upon public health than any scientific discovery." -- Rosalynn Carter, former First Lady"A radical new perspective on the true drivers of health -- and a set of truly disruptive conclusions to inspire those designing health systems. A defining manifesto for the years ahead." -- Arnaud Bernaert, World Economic Forum"An elegant, jarring examination of the public's health in America-which for all of its flaws remains the source of our greatest hope for the future." -- Karen DeSalvo, former Acting Assistant Secretary for Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services"A superb account of how money, power, politics, and the luck of the draw affect the health of individuals and populations. It should inspire all of us to follow Galea in championing public health as an essential public good, and in treasuring and preserving the core values of public-health fairness, justice, and compassion for all." -- Marion Nestle, author of Unsavory Truth"The passionate argument we need for the health we deserve. What an important frame for the right to health!" -- Leana Wen, President, Planned Parenthood Federation of America Agency"With healthcare increasingly a political football, Well guides us toward what is truly needed for a healthier world. Its power comes from Galea's remarkable ability to draw on the power of individual stories and lived experience to humanize the issues and inspire commitment to improved health for all." -- Margaret Hamburg, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner"A compassionate, relevant book." -- Kirkus"[Well] tells the tale of our individual and collective health's present and future as fluidly and eloquently as would any master storyteller... Galea's book is like a meditation on what can make for a healthier world. He is uniquely gifted to give us this broader prescription for our lives and those of our children and grandchildren. His is a message of hope, and we should listen."--The Lancet "Cogently and often movingly, epidemiologist Sandro Galea argues that an obsession with drugs, doctors and insurance obscures the fact that the roots of sickness and health are life circumstances: money, status, education, environment and a range of other socio-economic issues. With the richest 1% living for up to 15 years longer than the poorest 1%, investment in public goods such as education, universal health coverage and environmental regulation is ever more urgent."--Nature "Sandro Galea gives a revolutionary perspective on the state of public health in the United States and tells us how it can be fixed... Every American particularly policy-makers must read Well."--Washington Book Review "An impeccably researched, well-reasoned look at a complex topic."--olumbia Magazine

Arianna Huffington

Sandro Galea is Dean and Robert A. Knox Professor at the Boston University School of Public Health. He has been named an "epidemiology innovator" by Time and one of the "World's Most Influential Scientific Minds" by Thomson Reuters. A native of Malta, he has served as a field physician for Doctors Without Borders and held academic positions at Columbia University, University of Michigan, and the New York Academy of Medicine. At the time of his current appointment, he was the youngest dean of a school of public health in the United States.