Pakistan is living through a diabetes emergency. Tens of millions are already diagnosed; millions more do not yet know they are sick. The disease does not confine itself to clinics — it runs through families, hollows out household incomes, overwhelms hospitals, and reshapes individual lives, often from the moment a late diagnosis lands without enough guidance or support to make sense of it. It is into this reality that Dr. Nauman Niaz steps with his nineteenth book — not to observe the crisis from a safe distance, but to meet it head-on.
Before a single line of text is read, the book announces itself differently. Every illustration inside was conceived and painted by hand — born of thought, skill, and deliberate artistic intention before ever reaching a press. At a time when artificial intelligence can produce an image in seconds, this book moves purposefully in the other direction. The artwork is human in origin, specific in meaning, and woven into the ideas themselves. It is not decoration. It is the book’s heartbeat — and in today’s medical publishing world, that makes it genuinely rare.
Myth & Reality was launched by Getz Pharma, not as a commercial exercise, but as an act of giving back. Behind that decision stands Khalid Mahmood, Executive Chairman of Getz Pharma — an entrepreneur as widely respected for his social conscience as for his business vision. He has invested in schools, playgrounds, and charitable causes; he is a committed bibliophile with deep passions for poetry, calligraphy, art, and music; and he is among the most generous supporters of the Zindagi Trust, which promotes art, music, vocational training, and emerging artists.
Dr. Niaz arrived at this book carrying two very different motivations. The first is personal. His reputation has been built largely through cricket — a field where he has written extensively, earned significant recognition, and found lasting purpose. Yet inside that career lived a quieter ambition: to leave something meaningful in endocrinology, the discipline that gave him not just professional standing but a deeper sense of who he is. This book is the fulfilment of that ambition.
The second motivation is intellectual and literary. Dr. Niaz grew up with the great medical textbooks — Harrison, Cecil, P. J. Kumar — and admired their authority even as he recognised that they were written for insiders. He chose a different approach: weaving clinical data, real patient predicaments, and the latest evidence on diabetes and obesity together with art, literature, and writing that actually breathes. The result is a reference that does not require a medical degree to read and benefit from.
That openness is entirely deliberate. This is a book written for the patient trying to understand their own diagnosis as much as for the specialist who treats it. It is written for students and teachers entering the field, for pharmacists navigating the treatment landscape, and for clinicians who want a companion volume that thinks differently. It is readable without being simplified, and thorough without being cold.
Some of its most memorable chapters go where standard endocrinology texts rarely venture. One explores elite athletes competing at the highest levels of world sport while managing Type 2 Diabetes — a portrait of discipline, adaptation, and the refusal to be reduced to a diagnosis. Another takes an honest, unsentimental look at the homeopathic, herbal, hakim, and quackery practices that millions of Pakistanis rely on every day, often in place of evidence-based care. The fact that this book addresses such practices directly, and without condescension, says something important about its character.
Myth & Reality: Type 2 Diabetes is a book to read, to return to, and to press into the hands of others — for the endocrinologist in training, for the patient standing at a crossroads, and for every thoughtful, caring mind in between. Dr. Nauman Niaz has written his nineteenth book the way he has written all the others: with the conviction that serious, heartfelt writing can change the way we understand the things that matter most.
