There are so few good belly laughs in healthcare these days. What a pity I possibly the only person on the planet to enjoy the guffaw-laden, if slightly unnerving, experience of reading Dr Nancy Snyderman and Dr Nortin Hadler’s new books in tandem.

Both are practicing physicians who have made second careers interpreting medical principles for a lay audience. Both consider themselves experts not only in illness but also in wellness, that shimmering grail of our time. Both have combed through all the latest studies and are now pleased to provide you, the average healthy adult, with guidelines for staying well.

Both muster science, statistics and a smattering of personal experience to present, with no small fanfare, completely, utterly, diametrically opposite advice.

Dr Snyderman, a surgeon and longtime broadcast journalist who is the chief medical editor of NBC News, delivers no surprises. Her mission is to assure readers that enough attention to the principles of modern medical science will bring you a longer, healthier life.

With chirpy, can-do optimism she recapitulates the standard wisdom in her Medical myths that can kill you and the 101 truths that will save, extend and improve your life.

Watch your diet, exercise, lose weight, stop smoking, be screened regularly for a variety of dire illnesses, rein in cholesterol and blood sugar, stay in touch with your doctor and be sure to check out those aches and pains pronto, just in case. So speaks the medical establishment.

Everyone, perhaps, but Dr Hadler, a rheumatologist and professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina who is a longtime debunker of much the establishment holds dear. Hadler may not actually keep a skull on his desk, but he might as well. We are all going to die, he reminds us. Holding every dire illness at bay forever is simply not an option, he expounds in A prescription for health in an overtreated America”.

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