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Reviews for Living Well with Heart Failure, the Misnamed, Misunderstood Condition

I found this book to be a key new resource for patients and families, as well as professionals. I have recommended this book to many patients and each one has commented on how it has helped them better understand heart failure and heart failure treatments. These patients noted how helpful to them it was to hear from a "patient" like them, instead of just someone talking about heart failure who may have never personally experienced it. Some have noted that it has "demystified" heart failure for them, and made it less scary.

As a professional, I found this book also very helpful as a patient education resource for me. I often skim it and use its up-to-date, thorough explanations of heart failure treatments in my patient education sessions.

Sue Wingate RN, PhD, CRNP
Immediate Past-President,
American Association of Heart Failure Nurses

Brave, wise, unblinking, Living Well with Heart Failure is more than a book. For heart patients, it's the perfect friend. Calm, clear, deeply knowledgeable and helpful and reassuring, it's the joint work of a great medical writer who was diagnosed with the problem, and the empathetic doctor who cured her, the clinical chief of cardiology at Johns Hopkins. It may be the best single source on smart living with a bad heart that anyone can buy.

Dudley Clendinen
Former New York Times national correspondent and editorial writer
Author, A Place Called Canterbury: Tales of the New Old Age in America.

Living Well with Heart Failure is a must-read for anyone who's been diagnosed with the condition or who will contribute to the care of someone with it. Throughout, the book takes a calm, careful and responsible approach to explaining what's happening to your body in heart failure, and what you can do to live better with it. In other words, the book does for heart failure what "What to Expect While You're Expecting" did for pregnancy. Without promising that anyone's heart failure will respond quite as well as Mary Knudson's did, the book is full of advice that readers can trust because it's backed with evidence. And when the time comes, Knudson is sober-minded enough to be able to recommend "probably the most pleasant way to leave this world." She's not talking about suicide, mind you; this is a book about living better and living well. Now that I've read the book, I'll be sure to recommend it to a family member with heart failure.

Ivan Oransky, MD
Executive Editor, Reuters Health

One of medicine's dirty little secrets is that physicians often learn things from materials written for patients. Edward Kasper and Mary Knudson's wonderful book on heart failure demonstrates that truth over and over. It is full of both gist and detail, clearly explained and usefully illustrated with graphics and personal narrative. Patients will learn a lot about this common and important disease. But so will doctors. Every non-cardiologist should spend an hour or two with Living Well with Heart Failure.

David Brown MD
Staff Writer, The Washington Post

Remarkably comprehensive, well organized and understandable. Could only be produced by a great physician-expert and his patient (who by chance) is a great professional medical journalist.

Myron L. Weisfeldt, MD
William Osler Professor of Medicine
Director, Department of Medicine Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions

I highly recommend this outstandingly smart book ; it will change the way you think about the heart and about your own health. In Living Well with Heart Failure, authors renowned heart specialist Dr. Edward Kasper and award-winning medical journalist Mary Knudson, have created an exceptionally helpful and incredibly readable way to explore the ways the heart fails and the ways we can help manage - and even heal - an injured organ. The result is an engaging and important exploration of human health, valuable not only to those suffering from heart failure but all the rest of us who want to preserve and protect vitality and well being.

Deborah Blum
Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York
Helen Firstbrook Franklin Professor of Journalism, University of Wisconsin

If you have heart failure, read this book! You will learn about your heart, what causes heart failure, and how to keep your heart healthy. This is an outstanding book, written by Ed Kasper, MD, one of the top heart failure doctors in the USA, and by Mary Knudson, who is not only a prominent medical writer but also a person with heart failure. These two experts have teamed up to write a guide for people with heart failure that is understandable, thoughtful, and complete. Kasper and Knudson lead you from symptoms to testing to treatments-all in a style that is clear and precise. Living Well with Heart Failure is the perfect introduction to heart failure.

Charles Lowenstein, MD
Chief of Cardiology
University of Rochester Medical Center

Living Well with Heart Failure: The Misnamed, Misunderstood Condition is the outcome of a successful co-authoring partnership between medical journalist Mary Knudson and cardiologist Edward K. Kasper. From Mary you get the added perspective of a patient, since she was diagnosed with heart failure in 2003. With about 6 million Americans living with heart failure today, I can see this book serving as a guide and as a resource for many patients and their families for years. I think they'll find the chapter on "The Doctor-Patient Therapeutic Relationship" especially helpful. Congratulations to Knudson and Kasper on this important contribution.

Gary Schwitzer
Publisher, HealthNewsReview.org

Even though the name “heart failure” is terrifying, the diagnosis does not mean that the heart is about to “fail” any minute– which is the heartening message of this wonderful book. Journalist Mary Knudson, after getting this scary diagnosis herself, has teamed up with her cardiologist, Edward Kasper, to deliver a compendium of fascinating information in a straightforward, friendly, smart voice that doesn't talk down to readers and doesn't confuse them, either. Here’s where you can find it all – the physiology of the heart and what can go wrong with it, the current thinking about surgical and medical interventions, and what you can do in terms of diet and exercise to prolong and enrich your life. This is a great resource for patients with heart failure and for the people who take care of them and love them.

Robin Marantz Henig
Contributing Writer
New York Times Magazine
Author of Pandora’s Baby and The Monk in the Garden

A key component of the management of heart failure is the patient’s understanding of the disease leading to an informed dialogue with the physician. This well-written book is a great learning tool for patients and an excellent first step in the relationship between the patient and his or her physician. Dr. Edward Kasper and Ms. Mary Knudson, by writing this book, have provided a real service to patients with heart failure.

Bernard J. Gersh, M.B., Ch.B., D.Phil.
Professor of Medicine, Mayo Medical School
Consultant, Cardiovascular Diseases and Internal Medicine, Mayo Clinic

Living Well with Heart Failure provides authoritative and actionable information on this frightening, often-misunderstood syndrome. From a clear description of the physiology of heart failure and the latest research on effective treatments, to practical advice on how to live a normal, satisfying life if you have been diagnosed with heart failure, Authors Kasper and Knudson really deliver the goods.

Nancy Shute
Contributing editor, US News & World Report