Medical Care

We have lost the war on cancer. We spend $150 billion each year treating it, yet - a few innovations notwithstanding - a patient with cancer is as likely to die of it as one was 50 years ago. Most new drugs add mere months to one's life at agonizing physical and financial cost. In The First Cell, Azra Raza offers a searing account of how both medicine and our society (mis)treats cancer, how we can do better, and why we must.

Each year in the US, a quarter of a million deaths are attributable to medical error. If the number shocks, on some level you already knew it was so. Everyone knows someone - perhaps it was yourself - who has suffered miserable treatment in American hospitals, part of the most elaborate, most extensive and expensive health-care system in the world. But it is perhaps the most inefficient. Misdiagnoses, wrong prescriptions, operating on the wrong patient, even operating on the wrong limb (and amputating it).

When Michael Collins decided to become a surgeon, he was totally unprepared for the chaotic life of a resident at a major hospital. A natural overachiever, Collins' success in college and medical school led to a surgical residency at one of the most respected medical centers in the world, the famed Mayo Clinic. But compared to his fellow residents, Collins felt inadequate and unprepared.

In this "must-read" guide (Lonnie Ali), four leading doctors and advocates offer a bold action plan to prevent, care for, and treat Parkinson's disease—one of the great health challenges of our time Brain diseases are now the world's leading source of disability. The fastest growing of these...

In recent years there have been major outbreaks of whooping cough among children in California, mumps in New York, and measles in Ohio's Amish country - despite the fact that these are all vaccine-preventable diseases. Although America is the most medically advanced place in the world, many people disregard modern medicine in favor of using their faith to fight life-threatening illnesses. In 21st-century America, how could this be happening?

With years of experience as a Registered Veterinary Technician, Frannie O’Callaghan offers an unapologetic window into the daily encounters of the humans who take care of pets. This whip-smart but darkly humorous confessional spans from the Patients who bite, claw, urinate, or defecate in scrub pockets. Are the few and farther in-between moments of wagging tails and slobbering tongues worth it?

NATIONAL BESTSELLER The New York Times bestselling author of Being Mortal and Complications examines, in riveting accounts of medical failure and triumph, how success is achieved in a complex and risk-filled profession The struggle to perform well is universal: each one of us faces fatigue...

Author Cory Franklin, MD, who headed the hospital's intensive care unit from the 1970s through the 1990s, shares his most unique and bizarre experiences, including the deadly Chicago heatwave of 1995, treating the first AIDS patients in the country before the disease was diagnosed, the nurse with rare Munchausen syndrome, the only surviving ricin victim, and the professor with Alzheimer's hiding the effects of the wrong medication.

A week after her 41st birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, pro-pain "dolorists", and the many little murders of capitalism.

Struggling to understand the complex mechanisms behind diseases? Pathophysiology Made Easy is here to transform the way you learn! Written by Callie Parker, this book breaks down the most challenging concepts into simple, digestible steps—so you can master the science without the stress. With Pathophysiology Made Easy, you’ll dive into 8 major body systems and explore 110 key topics, each explained in a step-by-step format that makes even the most complicated processes easy to understand.

“A profound exploration of what it means for all of us to live—and to die—with dignity and purpose.” —People “Visceral and lyrical.” —The Atlantic As the American born daughter of immigrants, Dr. Sunita Puri knew from a young age that the gulf between her parents' experiences...

The Tudor dynasty died out because there was no heir of Elizabeth I's body to succeed her. Henry VIII, despite his six marriages, had produced no legitimate son who would live into old age. Three of the reigning Tudors (Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I) died without heirs apparent, the most tragic case being that of Mary Tudor, who went through two recorded cases of phantom pregnancy. If it were not for physical frailty and the lack of reproductive health among the Tudors, the course of history might have been different.

While quackery—loosely defined as the spread of false "knowledge," often accompanied by various versions of "snake oil"—is not a novel phenomenon, it has never posed as great a threat to public health as today. In Quack Quack, Dr. Joe Schwarcz focuses on the deluge of anecdotes, cherry-picked data, pseudoscientific nonsense, and seductive baseless health claims that undermine efforts to educate the public about evidence-based science. The wide scope of the topics drawn from past and present aims to cast a life preserver to people drowning in a sea of misinformation.

*Canada Reads 2019 Longlist *Winner of the 2017 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction Do no harm is our most important rule, but we break it all the time trying to do good. In this deeply personal book, winner of the 2017 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction...

Written by experts and authorities in the field and professionally narrated for easy listening, this crash course is a valuable tool both during school and when preparing for the USMLE, or if you're simply interested in behavioral sciences. The audio is focused and high-yield, covering the most important topics you might expect to learn in a typical medical school behavioral sciences course. Included are both capsule and detailed explanations of critical issues and topics you must know to master behavioral sciences.

In Feminist, Queer, Crip, Alison Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a predetermined limit.

Written by experts and authorities in the field and professionally narrated for easy listening, this crash course is a valuable tool both during school and when preparing for the USMLE, or if you’re simply interested in the subject of sports nutrition. The audio is focused and high-yield, covering the most important topics you might expect to learn in a typical Medical school Sports Nutrition course. Included are both capsule and detailed explanations of critical issues and topics you must know to master sports nutrition.

Going against the conventional wisdom reinforced by the medical establishment and Big Pharma that more screening is the best preventative medicine, Dr. Gilbert Welch builds a compelling counterargument that what we need are fewer, not more, diagnoses. Documenting the excesses of American medical practice that labels far too many of us as sick, Welch examines the social, ethical, and economic ramifications of a health-care system that unnecessarily diagnoses and treats patients.

In the spirit of Oliver Sacks and the inspiration for the NBC drama New Amsterdam, this intensely involving memoir from a Medical Director of Bellevue Hospital looks poignantly at patients' lives and highlights the complex mind-body connection. Using the plights of twelve very different...

Three and a half months before her due date, Sophie Young is forced to deliver her tiny two-pound son—a baby boy barely old enough to survive. Caught in the labyrinth of hospital secrecy, Sophie meets the dark side of modern medicine: corruption, exploitation, and profiteering. When she discovers that a prominent physician has joined forces with Big Pharma to exploit pregnant women and their babies, she races to bring the guilty to justice and save her son before it’s too late.