Arnold Mann - Medical Journalist and Author

SPEAKER

Mr. Mann is available to speak on a number of subjects to a variety of audiences, from medical conferences and CME meetings to environmental meetings to students interested in medical journalism.

WHY I LOVE TALKING TO DOCTORS

Thirty years ago, it was with some apprehension that Mr. Mann visited his mentor, literary biographer Leon Edel, and informed the legendary scholar that he had left the PhD program at the graduate school he had been attending and was now writing about medicine. A 20-year veteran of journalism himself, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Henry James biographer listened, then said, "The medical world must be fascinating." It was and continues to be so.

Where literary scholars may argue for decades whether T. S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" is a personal statement or a commentary on his time—it is, in fact, a combination of the two—an entire field of medicine can come to a state of enlightenment in a moment when someone like Australian Nobel Laureate Barry Marshall proves to the world that the H-pylori bacteria is the culprit behind all peptic ulcer disease, which now can be cured with a course of antibiotics.

What Mr. Mann loves about talking to doctors is that every doctor he has talked to over the past three decades has had a compelling story to tell. And more often than not, they have been filled with the excitement of discovery. "There aren’t many fields in journalism where this is true," he says.

In this talk, Mr. Mann brings 30 years of scintillating anecdotes and bits of wisdom he has picked up along the way to show physicians what it is like on the other side of the fence; how the nation's leading news publications, like Time, choose and pursue their medical stories, and how physicians can best relate to the Fourth Estate.

GETTING A PUBLISHER INTERESTED IN YOUR BOOK

In this engaging presentation, Mr. Mann looks at what makes a successful medical book and the unique challenges of the physician-collaborator relationship.

Most physicians who want to author a book will find it necessary to work with a collaborating writer. Hopefully, the writer will know what they are doing. Even so, it is important for the physician to know what publishers are looking for in a book proposal and how to give their collaborator everything he or she needs so that the two of them, working as a team, can put together a proposal that will sell, and create the roadmap for what will be a successful book.

Mr. Mann draws on his own years as a medical journalist and his successful partnership with Dr. Keith Black in the recently released “Brain Surgeon: One Doctor's Inspiring Encounters with Mortality and Miracles” to show his audience how to pick the right collaborator and how to work within the author-collaborator relationship to go from concept to a compelling proposal to a book that will generate the kind of buzz needed to make it sell. “In the end,” he says, “it’s all about writing a good story.”

THE PLAGUE WITH NO NAME

After years of reporting on environmental issues, for Time and USA Weekend Magazine, and after two years of researching and writing his new book, "THEY'RE POISONING US!" FROM THE GULF WAR TO THE GULF OF MEXICO. AN INVESTIGATIVE REPORT. Mr. Mann has learned an important lesson about environmental reporting: You never know what's going on until you know what's going on.

What the world has been witnessing over the past two decades is the emergence of an entirely new disease paradigm—one rivaling that of the germ theory of disease, with the media learning in tandem with the researchers.

It's a difficult and frustrating learning curve for all concerned, pitting doctor against doctor, worker against employer, homeowner against builder and insurer, activist against industry, Gulf War Vets against the VA and DOD, and pretty much everyone against the government—while many of the sick live as environmental hermits; waiting, hoping for salvation, like the masses caught in the Limbo of Dante's Inferno.

And there is hope. In this talk, Mr. Mann takes the audience along the learning curve he has experienced as an investigative reporter to see where the science appears to be leading us, with untold surprises yet to come, and hopefully, someday soon, an effective treatment.