Short Stories - Dr. Fine has a series of short stories available for download

Books:

**Now Available: The Zero Calorie Diet

The Nature of Health

The User's Guide To The Health Care System That Isn't (coming soon)
How to Build a Health Care System 101 (coming soon)

The Zero Calorie Diet
Dr Fine has just completed the manuscript of The Zero Calorie Diet, a book that sets exceptional new ideas about eating and nutrition in the framework of a social critique.

The Zero Calorie Diet examines the physiology of fasting for the lay person, and draws lessons from that physiology which will help readers eat less. The Zero Calorie Diet lays out four critical new ideas that help people change how they think about food and eating: first, we have overestimated the number of calories most people need (the real number is 1000-1200 calories per day, not 2000-2500); second, it is dehydration that makes eating less so difficult -- people who eat less need to replace the sodium that they lose when they reduce their intake, in order to feel well after reducing that intake; third, that starch is absolutely unnecessary in the American diet, and can be eliminated; and fourth, occasional fasting helps people learn that they can eat less- or nothing at all -- for a few days, and still feel and function normally.

As Americans rethink the culture of excess that has dominated our national life for the last decade, and brought us into war and to a market collapse, we need a guide to eating and nutrition that connects our personal choices with our national and cultural opportunities for change. The Zero Calorie Diet is that guide, and is a book that can help direct that change.

The Nature of Health
In 2007 Dr. Michael Fine, with co-author Jim Peters, published The Nature of Health, now in its third printing, and finally available in trade paperback format.

The Nature of Health is the first health policy book since Mirage of Health (Rene Dubos,1959) and Medical Nemesis (Ivan Illich,1975) to consider the meaning of health as most people understand it, and to suggest the design a health care system that delivers the health people want.

Health, the authors argue, is the equal ability of individuals to function in the relationships appropriate to their cultural context and place in the life cycle. In the process of deriving the meaning of health, we critique the function of the medical services marketplace, and draw useful and clear distinctions between health, longevity, medication, medical services, the medical services marketplace, a health care system, and social justice. Health, according to the authors, is a necessary condition but not the same thing as longevity; medication and medical services sometimes undermine the possibility of health if they distort community economic and social well being; and the notion of equal life chances is the ethical imperative that ought to inform our distribution of health care resources.

The Nature of Health proposes building a health care system for the Unites States that serves all Americans. As they describe how we can provide primary care to all Americans, town by town and neighborhood by neighborhood, the authors describe a system that will save one trillion dollars a year as it improves the measured health of the US population, builds social capital, and improves the economic base of American communities. The strategy that The Nature of Health lays out is affordable, politically achievable (it includes elements of health policy proposals from both left and right), evidence based, and is squared centered on leveraging our health care system to strengthen American democracy as its central organizing principal.

The Nature of Health is not about health insurance reform. It is about the design of a health care system after all, a health care system that is personal, rational, affordable, and just; a health care system that builds America's communities, instead of a marketplace that causes many of the ills it claims to treat.

Also in late 2009 or early 2010, look for The User's Guide To The Health Care System That Isn't, and How to Build a Health Care System 101, two titles now in preparation.