Medical Biography

So, you were just diagnosed with breast cancer - what now? Hold on! There is hope. You can take control of your journey to recovery, feel connected to yourself and others, and get through this. Join Birgitte (Deda) Wilms as she recounts her breast cancer journey and learn how she got through all of her therapy, treatments, surgeries, and turned her experience into a blessing. Birgitte's road wasn't easy, but she is now fully cured and thriving, and you can be as well. Don’t go through this journey alone; listen to Live Well beyond Breast Cancer today.

In this illuminating program, visionary and scientist Gregg Braden takes you on a journey of exploration, discovery, mystery, and insight that leads you to the wisdom of the ancients and an understanding that the most powerful force in the universe resides within you now. Braden cites study...

Outlaw Patients is a raw, darkly funny, and fiercely honest memoir about trying to survive in a system that wasn’t built to help. Medical marijuana patient and longtime activist Russell Barth takes listeners inside the chaotic, painful, often absurd world of Canadian cannabis policy — and the strange place where medicine, bureaucracy, and rebellion overlap.

One of Harvard Public Health Magazine's Best Public Health Books of the Year Profiles in Mental Health Courage portrays the dramatic journeys of a diverse group of Americans who have struggled with their mental health. This book offers deeply compelling stories about the bravery and resilience...

Nobody's Victim is an unflinching look at a hidden world most people don’t know exists—one of stalking, blackmail, and sexual violence, online and off—and the incredible story of how one lawyer, determined to fight back, turned her own hell into a revolution. “We are all a moment...

As an active surgeon and former department chairman, Dr. Paul A. Ruggieri has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of his profession. In Confessions of a Surgeon, he pushes open the doors of the OR and reveals the inscrutable place where lives are improved, saved, and sometimes lost. He shares the successes, failures, remarkable advances, and camaraderie that make it exciting.

The search to find medicines is as old as disease, which is to say as old as the human race. Through serendipity - by chewing, brewing, and snorting - some Neolithic souls discovered opium, alcohol, snakeroot, juniper, frankincense, and other helpful substances. Ötzi the Iceman, the 5,000-year-old hunter frozen in the Italian Alps, was found to have whipworms in his intestines and Bronze Age medicine, a worm-killing birch fungus, knotted to his leggings.

Furiously Happy meets Elaine Lui in this truly original - and surprisingly hilarious - memoir about one woman’s journey to learn how to walk after a debilitating diagnosis turned her life upside down.Learn How to Walk (Again) To-Do List: Step 1: Stand, Step 2: Step, Step 3: Pee (Yes!), Step 4: Walk with walker, Step 5: Walk with sticks, Step 6: Walk without props Recreational interlude for sex Step, 7: RUN! Ruth Marshall - power-mom, wife, actor, and daughter - was in great health, until one day, her feet started to tingle.

Elizabeth Ford went through medical school unsure of where she belonged. It wasn't until she did her psychiatry rotation that she found her calling - to care for one of the most vulnerable populations of mentally ill people, the inmates of New York City's jails, including Rikers Island, who are so sick that they are sent to the Bellevue Hospital Prison Ward for care.

Manjusha Pawagi, a successful family court judge, has written a not-so-typical memoir about her experience with cancer. Wryly funny and stubbornly hopeful, this is her quirky take on what it’s like to face your own mortality when, to be honest, you thought you’d live forever. She describes how even the darkest moments of life can be made worse with roommates; details how much determination it takes to ignore the statistics; and answers the age-old question: What does it take to get a banana popsicle around here?

In the early evening on October 1, 2003, Christina Crosby was three miles into a 17 mile bicycle ride, intent on reaching her goal of 1,000 miles for the riding season. She was a respected senior professor of English who had celebrated her 50th birthday a month before. As she crested a hill, she caught a branch in the spokes of her bicycle, which instantly pitched her to the pavement. Her chin took the full force of the blow, and her head snapped back. In that instant, she was paralyzed.

This Close to Happy is the rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression, written from a woman's perspective and informed by an acute understanding of the implications of this disease over a lifetime. Taking off from essays on depression she has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin casts her eye back to her beginnings to try to sort out the root causes of her affliction.

In this revelatory memoir, doctor Cynthia Li shares the truth other doctors don’t always understand and often won’t share if they do - that chronic illness is complicated, and that treatment is not just a matter of test results and prescriptions but requires a more comprehensive approach. By sharing her own struggle with a disabling autoimmune crisis, which forced her to question her own conventional medical training and embrace the integrative principles of functional medicine, Li reveals the insider knowledge sufferers need to truly begin healing - mind, body, and spirit.

this exciting story illuminates the captivating world of the late Renaissance - in this case its plagues, remedies, and alchemy - through the life of Leonardo Fioravanti, a brilliant, remarkably forward-thinking, and utterly unconventional doctor. Fioravanti's marvelous cures and talent for self-aggrandizement earned him the adoration of the people, the scorn of the medical establishment, and a reputation as one of the age's most colorful, combative figures.

Lauren Marks was 27 when an aneurysm ruptured in her brain and left her fighting for her life. She woke up in a hospital soon after with serious deficiencies to her reading, speaking, and writing abilities, and an unfamiliar diagnosis: aphasia. This would be shocking news for anyone, but Lauren was a voracious reader, an actress, director, dramaturg, and pursuing her PhD. At any other period of her life, this diagnosis would have been a devastating blow. But she woke up...different.

An estimated 50 million people in the world suffer from dementia. Diseases such as Alzheimer’s erase parts of one’s memory but are also often said to erase the self. People don’t simply die from such diseases; they are imagined, in the clichés of our era, as vanishing in plain sight, fading away, or enduring a long goodbye. In On Vanishing, Lynn Casteel Harper, a Baptist minister and nursing home chaplain, investigates the myths and metaphors surrounding dementia and aging....

Vincent Di Maio, MD, son of a famous New York City medical examiner, is one of the lions of forensic science. In this clear, gritty, and enthralling narrative, Di Maio himself guides us into the inner sanctum, through the cases that have made him famous, from the exhumation of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and the racially charged shooting of Florida teen Trayvon Martin to the unmasking of a serial baby killer and the mysterious death of troubled genius Vincent van Gogh.

The life of a veterinarian is challenging: keeping up with advances in medical care, making difficult decisions about people's beloved companions, and, in Dr. Doug Mader's case, navigating the social unrest in Los Angeles in the early 1990s. The Vet at Noah's Ark follows Dr. Mader and his staff over the course of a year at Noah's Ark Veterinary Hospital, an inner-city LA area veterinary hospital where Dr. Mader treats not only dogs and cats, but also emus, skunks, snakes, foxes, monkeys, and a host of other exotic animals

On the surface, Victoria Jackson is the American Dream personified: from a troubled childhood and unfinished high school education, she overcame immeasurable odds to create a cosmetics empire valued at more than half a billion dollars. Married to Bill Guthy - self-made principal of infomercial marketing giant Guthy-Renker - Victoria’s most treasured role is mother to three beautiful, beloved children, Evan, Ali, and Jackson. Suddenly, Victoria’s dream life is broken....

Cystic fibrosis was once a mysterious disease that killed infants and children. Now it could be the key to healing millions with genetic diseases of every type - from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to diabetes and sickle cell anemia. Told from the perspectives of the patients, families, physicians, scientists, and philanthropists fighting on the front lines, Breath from Salt is a remarkable story of unlikely scientific and medical firsts, of setbacks and successes, and of people who refused to give up hope....