Please join Countway Library and the HMS Arts and Humanities Initiative for a fireside with chat with author Lucy McBride, MD, and Suzanne Koven, MD, about Dr. McBride's new book Beyond the Prescription: A Doctor's Guide to Taking Charge of Your Health. 

About the Book

If you’ve ever left a doctor’s appointment with a prescription but no plan, a stack of “normal” lab results but no answers, or the feeling that no one actually listened, you’re not alone.

In Beyond the Prescription, a USA Today National Bestseller, Dr. Lucy McBride explains why: Modern health care prioritizes transactions over relationships, screens over stories, and data over context. Into that void has stepped a massive wellness industry offering seductive promises of control—“optimize,” “detox,” “biohack”—often without evidence and with real risks.

McBride refuses the false choice between conventional medicine and wellness culture. Instead, she offers a practical middle path built on health agency: the capacity to make informed decisions aligned with your values while advocating effectively for support. This book isn’t prescriptive or perfectionist. It’s a framework to help you navigate uncertainty, misinformation, and the realities of your life.

At the center is a five-step process that moves you from redefining health on your own terms, through mapping your full health ecosystem and understanding how you personally approach care, to asking for help more effectively and making peace with what you cannot control. The result is a practical, evidence-based guide for anyone navigating the question too rarely asked in health care: Are you okay?

About Dr. Lucy McBride

Dr. Lucy McBride is a primary care physician, nationally bestselling author, and cofounder of the Ackerly McBride Group in Washington, DC, where she has been caring for patients for over twenty-five years. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Medical School, with a master’s degree in pharmacology from the University of Cambridge as a Fulbright Scholar, she completed her medical training at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. McBride became a nationally recognized voice on the importance of addressing mental and physical health in tandem. She is the author of the popular weekly medical newsletter Are You Okay? and hosts the podcast Beyond the Prescription, where she pulls back the curtain on what it means to be healthy. Her first book, Beyond the Prescription, was a USA Today bestseller. Her writing has been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and USA Today, and she has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS, advocating for a data-driven, patient-centered, holistic approach to healthcare.

Dr. McBride believes that health is more than the absence of disease—it’s about awareness of our medical facts, acceptance of the things we cannot control, and agency over what we can change. Health, she argues, is a process, not an outcome. Known for her compassionate approach and ability to distill complex medical topics into accessible conversations, Dr. McBride empowers patients with evidence-based information and nuanced guidance for everyday health decisions.

A native Washingtonian, she lives in DC with her husband, two blocks from her parents. She is the proud mother of three grown children. You can find her work at LucyMcBride.com.

About Dr. Suzanne Koven

Dr. Suzanne Koven received her B.A. in English literature from Yale and her M.D. from Johns Hopkins. She also holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. After her residency training and chief residency in medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital, she joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School and practiced primary care internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital for over 30 years. She is an associate professor of medicine and global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School and holds the Valerie Winchester Family Endowed Chair in Primary Care Medicine at Mass General.

In 2019 Dr. Koven was named inaugural Writer in Residence at Mass General. Her essays, articles, blogs, and reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, NewYorker.com, Psychology Today, The L.A. Review of Books, The Virginia Quarterly, STAT, and other publications. Her monthly column “In Practice” appeared in The Boston Globe and won the Will Solimene Award for Excellence in Medical Writing from the American Medical Writers Association. Dr. Koven co-directs the Media and Medicine certificate program at Harvard Medical School and speaks to a wide variety of audiences on literature and medicine and the role of women in medicine. Her essay collection, Letter to a Young Female Physician, was published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 2021. Her next book, The Mirror Box: A Doctor’s Story, will be published by W.W. Norton & Co. on March 23, 2027.