A Note on Myth & Reality: Type 2 Diabetes

By Dr. Nauman Niaz (TI)

Pakistan carries one of the heaviest burdens of Type 2 Diabetes in the world. With tens of millions living with the disease and millions more undiagnosed its reach extends far beyond the clinic. It touches families, drains economies, strains hospitals, and quietly reshapes the lives of patients who often receive their diagnosis too late, with too little guidance, and too few resources to navigate what follows. It is against this reality that Dr. Nauman Niaz’s nineteenth book arrives: not as a retreat into academic distance, but as a direct engagement with a crisis hiding in plain sight.

What sets this volume apart before a single page of text is read is the art that lives within it. Every image was conceptualised and painted by hand brought into being through thought, craft, and deliberate visual expression before being taken to print. In an age when artificial intelligence can generate imagery at a keystroke, this book makes a conscious choice in the opposite direction. The paintings are human in origin, specific in intent, and inseparable from the ideas they serve. This is no decorative afterthought. It is the book’s essence, and in the landscape of contemporary medical publishing, it is a genuine rarity.

Getz Pharma launched Myth & Reality, Type 2 Diabetes, the Disease Impact In Pakistan, neither a transactional nor commercial exercise, but one based on giving back to society. Khalid Mahmood, Executive Chairman Getz Pharma, generally referred to as a progressive and innovative entrepreneur, also has a social side: investing in schools, playgrounds, and philanthropy. A bibliophile with keen interest in publishing, poetry, calligraphy, art and music, he is one of the most robust donors of Zindagi Trust, supporting art, music, opening up vocational centres, and encouraging unknown artists.

Dr. Niaz comes to this subject carrying two distinct motivations. The first is personal legacy. His name has long been synonymous with cricket, a discipline in which he has written prolifically, earned recognition, and built a career of enduring meaning. But within that success lived a quieter desire: to contribute something of substance to the field that had given him not only professional standing but a sense of self. Endocrinology was that field. This book is the fulfilment of that wish.

The second motivation is literary and intellectual. Growing up alongside the great medical textbooks — Harrison, Cecil, P. J. Kumar, Dr. Niaz absorbed their authority, but also recognised their weight. Those volumes were written for the initiated. He chose a different path: one that fuses numbers and statistics, real clinical predicaments, and the latest evidence on diabetes and obesity, with art, literature, and expressive writing. The result is a reference that does not demand a medical degree to be read with profit.

That breadth of access is intentional. This is a book written for the common reader as much as the clinician for patients trying to understand their own condition, for teachers and students entering the field, for pharmacists and pharmaceutical professionals navigating the treatment landscape, and for specialist physicians seeking a companion volume that thinks differently. It is readable without being reductive, and rigorous without being remote.

Among its most distinctive chapters are those that venture where standard endocrinology texts seldom go. One examines elite athletes managing Type 2 Diabetes at the highest levels of world sport, a study in discipline, adaptation, and the refusal to be defined by diagnosis. Another turns its gaze to homeopathic, herbal, hakim, and quackery practices that millions across Pakistan turn to daily, often instead of evidence-based care. That this book addresses the subject honestly, and without condescension, speaks to its ambition.

Myth & Reality: Type 2 Diabetes is a book to read, to return to, and to recommend. It is a reference for the years ahead for the endocrinologist in training, the patient at the crossroads of diagnosis, and every curious, caring mind in between. Dr. Nauman Niaz has written this nineteenth book with the same conviction that has marked all his others: that writing, done with seriousness and heart, can change how we see things that matter.