Wellness Industry

Can beliefs make you sick? Consider "The June Bug" incident from a US textile factory in the early 1960s. Many employees began to feel dizzy, had an upset stomach, and vomited. Some were even hospitalized. The illness was attributed to a mysterious bug biting workers. However, when the CDC investigated this outbreak, no bugs or any other cause of the illnesses could be identified. Instead, it appears to be an illness caused by the mind -- that is, sickness due to expectation.

Between August 1918 and March 1919, the Spanish influenza spread worldwide, claiming over 25 million lives. In this vivid narrative, Alfred W. Crosby recounts the course of the pandemic during the panic-stricken months of 1918 and 1919, measures its impact on American society, and probes the curious loss of national memory of this cataclysmic event. This edition includes a preface discussing the then-recent outbreaks of diseases, including the Asian flu and the SARS epidemic.

In the vein of Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Dorothy Roberts's Fatal Invention, Infected is the epic story of white supremacists, compromised doctors, racist politicians, and the heroes who challenged them.

In the last half of the twentieth century, Don Thomas discovered a cure for every marrow-based disease—like leukemia, lymphoma, and sickle-cell anemia—forever changing treatment for some of the deadliest illnesses. His feats were extraordinary, earning him a Nobel Prize, and the cascade of treatments he inspired have reshaped and will continue to reshape the practice of clinical medicine. Yet no one has ever written Thomas’s courageous story.Dr. Frederick R. Appelbaum, a member of Thomas’s research team, does so for the first time.

The emperor Justinian reunified Rome's fractured empire by defeating the Goths and Vandals. At his capital in Constantinople, he built the world's most beautiful building, married the most powerful empress, and wrote the empire's most enduring legal code, seemingly restoring Rome's fortunes for the next five hundred years. Then, in the summer of 542, he encountered a flea. The ensuing outbreak of bubonic plague killed 5,000 people a day in Constantinople and nearly killed Justinian himself.

In Mercies in Disguise, acclaimed New York Times reporter and best-selling author Gina Kolata tells the story of the Baxleys, an upstanding family in small-town South Carolina. Many of them were doctors, but still, they are struck down by an inscrutable illness. Finally they discover the cause of the disease after a remarkable sequence of providential events. Meanwhile science, progressing for 50 years along a parallel track, handed the Baxleys a question - not a cure but a blood test that would reveal who had the gene for the disease.

Was haben Lene, die gesunde Sportlehrerin, Thomas, der lebensfrohe und fitte Lektor, Dominik, der wissenschaftlich erfolgreiche Institutsdirektor und die Katzenmutter Karin gemeinsam? Sie sind plötzlich an Krebs erkrankt und wurden mit modernen medizinischen Behandlungsmethoden therapiert. Ob Krebs im Magen, Enddarm, in der Bauchspeicheldrüse oder im lymphatischen System, warum hat nur Karin überlebt? Dieser Frage geht Professor Christoph Wagener auf ungewöhnliche Weise nach und macht mit diesem Buch eine historische, anekdotische und kriminalistische Reise.

“Leading Healthcare Transformation: Doctors, Nurses, and Managers at the Helm” is an exhaustive analysis of the modern dynamics in the healthcare sector, with a particular emphasis on middle management leadership. It provides a deep dive into the roles, responsibilities, and leadership abilities required by different professionals, including doctors, nurses, and managers.

Antibiotics: What Everyone Needs to Know examines the personal and societal implications of our planet's most important - and frequently misused - medications. Grounded in the latest scientific research and crafted for general listeners, Antibiotics: What Everyone Needs to Know offers a clear-eyed overview of where we are, and what the future holds, as antibiotics lose their power.

The 1964 murder of a nationally known cancer researcher sets the stage for this gripping exposé of medical professionals enmeshed in covert government operations over the course of three decades. Following a trail of police records, FBI files, cancer statistics, and medical journals, this revealing book presents evidence of a web of medical secret-keeping that began with the handling of evidence in the JFK assassination and continued apace....

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.

G. Wayne Miller has dramatically and meticulously reconstructed an amazing true story: how a group of renegade Minnesota surgeons, led by Dr. Walt Lillehei, made medical history by becoming the first doctors to operate deep inside the human heart.

Proclaimed "girl-pervert" Oriana Small, aka Ashley Blue, a veritable artist at heart, weaves through the intricacies of a decade in and out of the adult film industry, love, drugs, and her own firebrand of what it means to live ecstatically. From accolades to agony, Girlvert illuminates the surreality of a life lived beyond all comprehension.

Today we have the knowledge, understanding, and technology to predictably relieve pain and neurological deficits like never before—yet many patients are still getting subpar care. Foundational knowledge of surgical spine care isn't spreading to the medical community, let alone to patients, whose quality of life hangs in the balance. With The Back Story on Spine Care, orthopedic specialist Dr. Drew Bednar presents case studies that illuminate the common issues plaguing patients—and their treatment—today.

Outlining how generations of public health and science advocates have attempted to hold the line against Big Pharma and their allies in government, Alexander Zaitchik's first-in-kind history documents the rise of medical monopoly in the United States and its subsequent globalization. From the controversial arrival of patent-wielding German drug firms in the late 19th century, to present-day coordination between industry and philanthropic organizations, Owning the Sun tells one of the most important and least understood histories of our time.

As much of the world's population grows older, the quest for a "good death" has become a significant issue. For many, the right to die often means the right to die with dignity. The Inevitable moves beyond margins of the law to the people who are meticulously planning their final hours - far from medical offices, legislative chambers, hospital ethics committees, and polite conversation - and the people who help them, loved ones or clandestine groups on the Internet known as the "euthanasia underground".

Addiction is a preventable, treatable disease, not a moral failing. As with other illnesses, the approaches most likely to work are based on science - not on faith, tradition, contrition, or wishful thinking. These facts are the foundation of Clean, a myth-shattering look at drug abuse by the author of Beautiful Boy. Based on the latest research in psychology, neuroscience, and medicine, Clean is a leap beyond the traditional approaches to prevention and treatment of addiction.

In this book, Stephen G. Post offers new perspectives on the worth and dignity of people with Alzheimer's and related disorders despite the negative influence of "hypercognitive" values that place an ethically unacceptable emphasis on human dignity as based on linear rationality and strength of memory. With vignettes and narratives, he argues for a deeper dignity grounded in consciousness, emotional presence, creativity, interdependence, music, and a self that is not "gone" but "differently abled."

From Dr. Rosanne M. Leipzig, a top doctor with more than thirty-five years of experience caring for older people, Honest Aging is an indispensable guide to the second half of life, describing what to expect physically, psychologically, functionally, and emotionally as you age.

Dr. Oliver Sacks's books Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars and the best-selling The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat have been acclaimed for their compassion in the treatment of patients affected with profound disorders. In A Leg to Stand On, it is Sacks himself who is the patient: an encounter with a bull on a desolate mountain in Norway has left him with a severely damaged leg. But what should be a routine recuperation is actually the beginning of a strange medical journey.