I used to work as a hepatitis C nurse, counseling patients and monitoring their treatment, so I looked at this book both as a resource for self-education of people living with hep C, and as a summary of the current state of medicine for nurses and allied professionals. I recommend it strongly on both counts.

The writing is clear and engaging, uses patient testimonials nicely to get across the variety of experiences, and offers several levels of detail: most sections should be easy enough for any high-school graduate, but there are more technical descriptions of research findings for readers who want to dig deeper. (Really the only problem I have with the presentation is that those levels are closely mingled throughout, so someone who just wants the big picture will have to skip sections pretty often; it might be better to move things like clinical trial data into an appendix, since the writers’ paraphrases of the data are to my eye very clear and fair.) There’s a good balance between discussion of antiviral treatment options and practical measures for improving health without the treatment. They’re careful not to imply that we know more than we do, and this is a field with a lot of unknowns and some quickly-moving science—but I don’t think the 2006 edition has anything that’s out of date, except for clinical trials that were ongoing at that time, some of which have gone to the next phase or been stopped (good sources for the most recent developments are hcvadvocate.org and hivandhepatitisc.com).

Note, this is a book about the current consensus in (for lack of a better term) Western medicine; the authors acknowledge that they don’t know much about Chinese medicine or other alternatives, and neither do I.

The Hepatitis C Help Book
Misha Ruth Cohen, Robert Gish and Kalia Doner
2007

I read this book as a nurse working with hepatitis C patients, and as someone without any knowledge of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). I’m not sure who the book’s ideal reader would be, but I don’t think it’s me or my patients. It takes the unusual approach of alternating chapters or half-chapters between Dr. Gish, a GI/hepatology physician of some renown, and Dr. Cohen, a Chinese medicine practitioner at a clinic that sees some of the same patients. The two halves have virtually nothing in common: Gish’s side is more or less like other mainstream books on the subject, although not the best-written of them, while Cohen starts every section with something along the lines of “In TCM, [whatever organ, cell, or other concept Gish just explained] has nothing to do with this disease; it’s an imbalance between [nondescriptive name of some principle in TCM] and [another one of those]”... basically a lot of terms that, to anyone who hasn’t studied TCM, will just sound like gibberish and not really give any basis for understanding what the doctor thinks you should do. Now I know that that’s more or less how even the simplest “Western” medical teaching would sound to someone who’s never heard of any of its concepts, but the fact is that just about everyone here has heard of at least the very basic ones, so it’s possible to describe even something as complicated as the immune system in simple terms and, if necessary, explain how those concepts can be tested and applied. Gish sort of does that, but—at least for me, and I think for any reader without that training—Cohen doesn’t. I’m left with the impression that they have two totally contradictory approaches, and it’s not clear whether they really think there’s a way that they can both be accurate, or whether they’ve just decided not to argue. In any case, I’m not sure what a patient would take away from the book itself; it seems more useful as a guide to further reading, or an incentive to ask your doctor more about everything.