Wellness Industry

Based on the film by acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, The Mayo Clinic: Faith, Hope, Science chronicles the history of this unique organization, from its roots as an unlikely partnership between a country doctor and a Franciscan order of nuns to its position today as a worldwide model for patient care, research, and education. The book demonstrates how the institution’s remarkable 150-year history continues to inspire the way medicine is practiced there today.

Adults who have been undiagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often face a daily struggle but remain unaware there is a way to make life better. This audiobook explains the process of autism diagnosis through a former patient's personal account after being diagnosed with autism. Containing humorous anecdotes and stories, this audiobook provides an alternative perspective of looking at autism spectrum disorder.

How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and their Caregivers is a life-affirming, instructive, and inspiring book about living gracefully and purposefully with the challengesfaced by those with chronic pain or illness. These conditions, while not always life-threatening, are life-disrupting and stressful. The audiobook contains over two dozen tools and practices to help people live skillfully and to find equanimity and joy despite the profound changes in their lives.

In 1866, 12 men and women and one small child were forced aboard a leaky schooner and cast away to a natural prison on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. Two weeks later, a dozen others were exiled, and then 40 more, and then 100 more. Tracked by bounty hunters and torn screaming from their families, the luckless were loaded into shipboard cattle stalls and abandoned in a lawless place where brutality held sway. Many did not have leprosy, and most of those who did were not contagious.

In 1875, tuberculosis was the deadliest disease in the world, accountable for a third of all deaths. A diagnosis of TB - often called consumption - was a death sentence. Then, in a triumph of medical science, a German doctor named Robert Koch deployed an unprecedented scientific rigor to discover the bacteria that caused TB. Koch soon embarked on a remedy - a remedy that would be his undoing. When Koch announced his cure for consumption, Arthur Conan Doyle, then a small-town doctor in England and sometime writer, went to Berlin to cover the event.

In The Performance of Medicine, Dr. Bob Baker offers practical strategies and techniques that physicians and other practitioners can implement easily and immediately to give patients the best possible experience with no additional expenditure of time. An internist/gastroenterologist with 35 years of private practice experience, as well as a professional magician/ventriloquist with 50 years of live performance experience, Dr. Baker seamlessly weaves the techniques he used to garner top reviews from his patients and audiences alike. His audiobook is practical, warm, and humorous.

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.

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.

Physicians enter their professions with the highest of hopes and ideals for compassionate and efficient patient care. Along the way, however, recurring problems arise in their interactions with some patients that lead physicians to label them as "difficult." Some studies indicate that physicians identify 15 percent or more of their patients as "difficult." The negative feelings that physicians have toward these patients may lead to frustration, cynicism, and burnout.

In 1995, a scandal erupted when the New York Times revealed that the Smithsonian possessed a century’s worth of nude “posture” photos of college students. In this riveting history, Beth Linker tells why these photos were only a small part of the incredible story of twentieth-century America’s largely forgotten posture panic—a decades-long episode in which it was widely accepted as scientific fact that Americans were suffering from an epidemic of bad posture, with potentially catastrophic health consequences.

Kate Paris Battaglia, a resilient high school student, has taken advantage of Covid-imposed solitude to author her first book: 101 Tips for Surviving in a Pandemic: A Generation Z Guidebook. Born near 2000, Kate allows listeners to travel into the minds of a generation accustomed to the technology of the internet. However, she surprisingly does not dwell on social media to cure all ills that Covid-19 and its variants have inflicted upon the "zoomers" of Gen Z.

Seamus O'Mahony writes about the illusion of progress, the notion that more and more diseases can be "conquered" ad infinitum. He punctures the idiocy of consumerism, the idea that healthcare can be endlessly adapted to the wishes of individuals. He excoriates the claims of Big Science, the spending of vast sums on research follies like the Human Genome Project. And he highlights one of the most dangerous errors of industrialized medicine: an over-reliance on metrics, and a neglect of things that can't easily be measured, like compassion.

You Can’t Chart Gut Instinct is a field report from the back of the bus. Written between psych calls, refusals, overdoses, and the kind of trauma that doesn’t leave visible bruises. It’s not a guide. It’s a mirror.

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.

Although Roe v. Wade identified abortion as a constitutional right 45 years ago, it still bears stigma - a proverbial scarlet A. In public discussion, both proponents and opponents of abortion's legality tend to focus on extraordinary cases. This tendency keeps the national debate polarized and contentious. Professor Katie Watson focuses instead on the cases that happen the most, which she calls "ordinary abortion". Scarlet A gives the reflective listener a more accurate impression of what the majority of American abortion practice really looks like.

The natural limits of the human body make us vulnerable and therefore dependent, throughout our lives, on others. Yet American law and policy disregard these stubborn facts, with statutes and judicial decisions that presume people to be autonomous, defined by their capacity to choose. As legal scholar O. Carter Snead points out, this individualistic ideology captures important truths about human freedom, but it also means that we have no obligations to each other unless we actively, voluntarily embrace them.

This book is written by America's top medical preparedness experts: Joe Alton, MD, and Amy Alton, ARNP. Their mission: to put a medically prepared person in every family for when medical help is not on the way. Using decades of medical experience, they address, in plain language, dozens of medical issues associated with surviving disasters and epidemics. The Altons also discuss the medical supplies needed to become a medical asset to your family and community as well as alternative and natural strategies for when pharmaceuticals aren't available.

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.

Fair Doses is a story of vaccines: how they came about, why they are important, and how they have been made globally available—although our quest for vaccine equity is still ongoing. In this fascinating deep dive into vaccines, Dr. Seth Berkley offers an inside view of the challenges of developing and disseminating vaccines for a broad swath of illnesses, from Ebola to AIDS to malaria and beyond.

For the crime of falling sick without wealth, Americans today face lawsuits, wage garnishment, home foreclosure, and jail time. Yet who really profits from aggressive medical debt collection? Your Money or Your Life reveals how medical debt collection became a multi-billion-dollar industry and how everyday Americans are made to pay the price. Emergency physician and historian Luke Messac weaves patient stories into a history of law, finance, and medicine to show how debt and debt collection are destroying the foundational trust between doctors and patients at the heart of American healthcare.