Health Care Administration

The acclaimed author of Carved in Sand - a veteran investigative journalist who endured persistent back pain for decades - delivers the definitive book on the subject: an essential examination of all facets of the back pain industry, exploring what works, what doesn't, what may cause harm, and how to get on the road to recovery. In her effort to manage her chronic back pain, investigative reporter Cathryn Jakobson Ramin spent years and a small fortune on a panoply of treatments.

Dr. Zeev Neuwirth wrote Reframing Healthcare for leaders and organizations interested in understanding what the disrupters in healthcare are doing and, more to the point, for those who want to be the disrupters rather than the disrupted. This audiobook is a step-by-step guide for leadership teams that are intent on improving healthcare at an accelerated pace. It’s written for healthcare organizations that wish to thrive in a customer-centric, community-oriented, value-based healthcare system.

On December 24, 1992, six-year-old Lauren Rudolph was hospitalized with excruciating stomach pain. Less than a week later she was dead. Doctors were baffled: How could a healthy child become so sick so quickly? After a frenzied investigation, public-health officials announced that the cause was E. coli O157:H7, and the source was hamburger meat served at a Jack in the Box restaurant. During this unprecedented crisis, four children died and over seven hundred others became gravely ill.

In an effort to enlighten a new generation about its growing reliance on psychiatry, this illuminating volume investigates why psychiatry has become the fastest-growing medical field in history; why psychiatric drugs are now more widely prescribed than ever before; and why psychiatry, without solid scientific justification, keeps expanding the number of mental disorders it believes to exist. This revealing volume shows that these issues can be explained by one startling fact: in recent decades psychiatry has become so motivated by power that it has put the pursuit of pharmaceutical riches above its patients' well being.

Whether a patient, health consumer, physician, nurse, health executive, or elected official, somewhere deep in our brains is this simple truth: the American health system isn’t working, and it will only get worse if we don’t do something about it. Despite spending more money per capita on healthcare than any other country in the world, the U.S. struggles to match other nations in life expectancy, health outcomes and general well-being. Meanwhile the system spends more on unnecessary, ineffective and wasteful services than what we collectively invest in K-12 education in America.

Offering examples of how to make medicine better for the healers and those they serve, If I Betray These Words profiles clinicians across the country who are tough, resourceful, and resilient, but feel trapped between the patient-first values of their Hippocratic oath and the business imperatives of a broken healthcare system. If I Betray These Words confronts the threat and broken promises of moral injury—what it is; where it comes from; how it manifests; and who’s fighting back against it. We need better healthcare—for patients and for the workforce. It’s time to act.

Each week, people read about new and exciting cancer drugs. Some of these drugs are truly transformative, offering major improvements in how long patients live or how they feel. But what is often missing from the popular narrative is that, far too often, these new drugs have marginal or minimal benefits. Some are even harmful.

San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God's hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves - "anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care - ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for 20 years. Laguna Honda, lower-tech but human-paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished.

A renowned cardiologist and Harvard professor spells out the future digital shift of medicine—and how it will impact the lives not only of patients and health care professionals but of all humans.

Today’s deliberations about a revamped health care system are stuck and in need of fresh analysis and a new vision. Health Care Revolt sets out to provide just that and at a most propitious time in US history. Dr. Michael Fine’s manifesto frames the questions more expansively than others before him and offers an impassioned road map for a nation confused about which healthcare direction to travel.

Cancer strikes fear in people’s hearts around globe. So the appearance of a vaccine to prevent cancer - as we are assured the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine will - seemed like a game-changer. Since 2006, over 80 countries have approved the vaccine, with glowing endorsements from the world’s foremost medical authorities. Bringing in over $2.5 billion in annual sales, the HPV vaccine is a pharmaceutical juggernaut. Yet scandal now engulfs it worldwide. The HPV Vaccine on Trial is a shocking tale, chronicling the global efforts to sell and compel this alleged miracle.

The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t over. But even as governments around the world try to get it under control, they’re also starting to talk about what happens next. How can we prevent another pandemic from killing millions of people and devastating the global economy? Can we even hope to accomplish this? Bill Gates believes the answer is yes, and he has written a largely upbeat book that lays out clearly and convincingly what the world should learn from COVID-19, explains the science of fighting pandemics, and suggests what all of us can do to help prevent another one.

From Nobel laureate, world-renowned doctor, and noted human rights activist Dr. Denis Mukwege comes an inspiring clarion call-to-action to confront the scourge of sexual violence and better learn from women's resilience, strength, and power.

The United States spends far more money on health care than any other country, and yet nearly 50 million Americans are uninsured at least part of the time each year. Health Care Reform Now! is written for anyone who cares enough about our health-care situation to consider serious alternatives to the current system.

Patients at Risk: The Rise of the Nurse Practitioner and Physician Assistant in Healthcare exposes a vast conspiracy of political maneuvering and corporate greed that has led to the replacement of qualified medical professionals by lesser trained practitioners. As corporations seek to save money and government agencies aim to increase constituent access, minimum qualifications for the guardians of our nation’s healthcare continue to decline - with deadly consequences.

Few of us need convincing that the American health insurance system needs reform. But many of the existing proposals focus on expanding one relatively successful piece of the system or building in piecemeal additions. These proposals miss the point. As the Stanford health economist Liran Einav and the MIT economist and MacArthur Genius Amy Finkelstein argue, our health care system was never deliberately designed, but rather pieced together to deal with issues as they became politically relevant.

Developing life-changing drugs is risky and expensive, but that’s not what makes them unaffordable. Drug pricing is a staple of every news cycle and political debate. And while we’ve struggled for decades to agree on solutions that serve all patients without jeopardizing the invention of new medicines, many Americans suffer because they can’t afford the drugs they need. Do we really have to choose between affordability and innovation?

Interweaving history, original reportage, and personal narrative, Pandemic explores the origin of epidemics, drawing parallels between the story of cholera - one of history's most disruptive and deadly pathogens - and the new pathogens that stalk humankind today, from Ebola and avian influenza to drug-resistant superbugs.

Drawing upon the author's two decades teaching medical ethics, as well as his work as a practicing psychiatrist, this profound and addictive little book offers up challenging ethical dilemmas and asks listeners, What would you do? In short, engaging scenarios, Dr. Appel takes on hot-button issues that many of us will confront: genetic screening, sexuality, privacy, doctor-patient confidentiality. He unpacks each hypothetical with a brief reflection drawing from science, philosophy, and history, explaining how others have approached these controversies in real-world cases.

In Dying to Save You, Dr. William Queale takes you behind the scenes of our sickcare system. He uses deeply personal stories to explain how we got here and how systems thinking can get us out. But Dying to Save You isn’t just about medicine, science, and healthcare policy. This book is about you—and how you can stay out of the sickcare system altogether.