15 years ago the noted physician, Dr. Michael Lockshin, Professor of Medicine and Gynecology at Weill Cornell Medical School and Director of the Barbara Volker Center at the Hospital for Special Surgery wrote Guarded Prognosis, a book about the health care system from the point of view of a physician with broad experience in treating chronic disease. Michael Lockshin is one of America's preeminent experts in the long-term care of chronically ill patients. He is a pioneer in solving health-care issues that arise with the illnesses on which he has done his most renowned research-systemic lupus erythematosus, Antiphospholipid syndrome, and other autoimmune diseases which especially afflict women. Guarded Prognosis has been re-issued as an eBook. 15 years after its first publication, the reader will be struck by how far the we have come-in terms of electronic records and the new hospitalist system-but also by how little has changed for patients with chronic illness navigating the U.S. healthcare system. Guarded Prognosis is newly relevant in the light of the acrimonious debate over "Obamacare" whose passage Dr. Lockshin heartily endorses as a route to the universal health coverage so desperately needed by those with chronic illness. These affecting stories of chronically ill patients and the policy lessons learned from their experience make clear how important it is to change our inefficient, costly, and often inhumane healthcare system. Otherwise, each of us could be at risk not only from disease, but from fragmented and costly healthcare.
About the Author: Dr. Michael D. Lockshin is a pioneer in solving health-care issues that arise with the illnesses on which he has done his most renowned research - systemic lupus erythematosus, antiphospholipid antibody syndrome, and other autoimmune diseases which especially afflict women Dr. Lockshin is Director of the Barbara Volcker Center for Women and Rheumatic Disease, Hospital for Special Surgery and Professor of Medicine and Obstetrics-Gynecology at the Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School. In the 1990s he was Extramural Director, then Acting Director of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, National Institutes of Health and later Editor of Arthritis & Rheumatism, the premier rheumatology medical journal. He is the author two books, Guarded Prognosis, 1998, and, with Alida Brill, Dancing at the River's Edge, 2009, as well as more than 300 medical journal articles and book chapters, primarily on systemic lupus erythematosus, antiphospholipid antibody syndrome, and pregnancy in rheumatic diseases. His most recent interests have been teaching principles of management of chronic illness. He has been the recipient of numerous professional honors. He resides with his wife in Pound Ridge, New York. See Dr. Lockshin's website www.MichaelLockshin.com for more information about Dr. Lockshin and his work.