Medical Illnesses

A young woman puts on a white coat for her first day as a student doctor. So begins this powerful debut, which follows our unnamed narrator through cadaver dissection, surgical rotation, difficult births, sudden deaths, and a budding relationship with a seminarian. In the troubled world of the hospital, where the language of blood tests and organ systems so often hides the heart of the matter, she works her way from one bed to another, from a man dying of substance use and tuberculosis, to a child in pain crisis, to a young woman, fading from confusion to aphasia to death.

A History of the Present Illness takes listeners into overlooked lives in the neighborhoods, hospitals, and nursing homes of San Francisco, offering a deeply humane and incisive portrait of health and illness in American today....In the tradition of Oliver Sacks and Abraham Verghese, Aronson's writing is based on personal experience and addresses topics of current social relevance. Masterfully told, A History of the Present Illness explores the role of stories in medicine and creates a world pulsating with life, speaking truths about what makes us human.

National Book Award winner Jonathan Kozol is best known for his 50 years of work among our nation's poorest and most vulnerable children. Now, in the most personal book of his career, he tells the story of his father's life and work as a nationally noted specialist in disorders of the brain and his astonishing ability, at the onset of Alzheimer's disease, to explain the causes of his sickness and then to narrate, step by step, his slow descent into dementia.

Best-seller du New York Times : ses secrets révélés pour la toute première fois ! Préparez-vous à entendre des choses que vous ne trouverez nulle part ailleurs. L’auteur de « Medical Medium », Anthony William, est capable de vous parler de votre santé comme personne, de déceler des maladies chroniques ou mystérieuses souvent mal diagnostiquées, mal traitées ou étiquetées en fonction de symptômes dont les professionnels de santé ne connaissent pas vraiment l’origine. Anthony aide les autres de cette façon depuis son enfance.

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.

We are all patients at some time. Is the medical industry giving us the best treatment possible, at the best price? We all know that it isn’t. My book, The Secrets of Medical Decision Making: How to avoid becoming a victim of the Health Care Machine, shows what goes on behind the scenes of the current medical care and how it impacts the patient. I describe actual cases from my clinical practice showing the most common paths that lead to increased patient suffering. I then offer possible solutions. My book covers all the health care settings a reader may encounter: outpatient (the most ...

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."

Despite advances in diagnosis and treatment, heart disease remains a major cause of illness and death. However, by proactively living a heart-friendly lifestyle, you can mitigate your risk for years to come.

Acclaimed CBS News reporter Barry Petersen writes about hearing the unimaginable; what it meant, what it still means, what he did---and didn't do---and how this beautiful love story needs to be heard by the thousands of families who have already heard that same devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer's disease. Even though Barry has spent his long-time, award-winning television career covering wars and events that shaped the world, he was not even slightly prepared for what happened to his darling wife, Jan, and how it would impact his life.

Bradwel reminds us that the centenary of this apparent "wonder drug" should be no cause for celebration. Insulin often remains inaccessible to those who need it most: elusive prescriptions, uneven availability and sky-high prices result in rationing and desperate do-it-yourself research and development. In the face of bootstraps rhetoric and "Pharma Bro" capitalists, patients across the world are left to fend for themselves. There is a long way to go in the twenty-first century until insulin truly fulfills the extraordinary promises made by its discovery.

Rebooting My Brain is the true story of what happens when you get yanked out of your life by a crisis and have to get back on the ride all over again. With refreshing candor, Maria Ross shares how the relentless pace of her life came to a screeching halt when an undetected brain aneurysm ruptured and nearly killed her. Along her stubborn road back to health, her resulting cognitive and emotional challenges forced her sometimes kicking and screaming to reframe her life, her work and her identity.

Written by the foremost dietician trained in DASH, Marla Heller this book is a simple, actionable plan that can fit seamlessly into everyone's life and lifestyle. Complete with recipes, meal plans, shopping lists, and more, this comprehensive, proven plan does not rely on magical combinations or forbidden foods - just fabulous, healthy eating!

Breasts: An Owner’s Manual is a straight-talking, myth and misconception-busting, strategy-filled guide to breast health. Sharing the latest on lifestyle choices that impact your risk factor including food, supplements, hormones and exercise, Dr. Funk demonstrates that you are so much more in control of whether or not you get breast cancer than you could ever dare to think. In fact, unless you carry a genetic mutation associated with breast cancer, the choices you make in your-day-to-day life trump genetics and family history when it comes to breast cancer risk, every time.

When Joselin Linder was in her 20s, her legs started to swell. She thought little of it until her health problems started to compound in ways that baffled her doctors. Diagnosed with extreme liver blockage and dangerous levels of lymph fluid, Joselin turned to the most similar case she could think of - her father's.

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....

Susan Doherty's groundbreaking book brings us a population of lost souls, ill-served by society, feared, shunted from locked wards to rooming houses to the streets to jail and back again. For the past ten years, some of the people who cycle in and out of the severely ill wards of the Douglas Institute in Montreal have found a friend in Susan, who volunteers on the ward, and then follows her friends out into the world as they struggle to get through their days. With their full cooperation, she brings us their stories, which challenge the ways we think about people with mental illness.

Journalist Sarah Dingle was 27 when she learned that her identity was a lie. Over dinner one night, her mother casually mentioned Sarah had been conceived using a sperm donor. The man who’d raised her wasn’t her father; in fact, she had no idea who her father was. Or who she really was. As the shock receded, Sarah began to investigate her own existence. Thus began a 10-year journey - digging through hospital files, chasing leads and taking a DNA test - that finally led to her biological origins.

An insightful, myth-busting biography of early 20th-century Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani, seen through the lenses of the artist’s tuberculosis and other ailments. Becoming Modigliani is a comprehensive biography that delves into the troubled life of the Jewish-Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani. Written by Dr. Henri Colt, an internationally recognized lung specialist, the book examines the artist's legend and Modigliani's creative journey from a medical perspective, from his birth in Livorno, Italy, to his tragic death in a paupers' hospital in Paris at the age of thirty-...

Allie Cashel has suffered from chronic Lyme disease for 16 years - but much of the medical community refuses to recognize her symptoms as the result of infectious disease. In Suffering the Silence: Chronic Lyme Disease in an Age of Denial, Cashel paints a living portrait of what is often called post-treatment Lyme syndrome, featuring the stories of chronic Lyme patients from around the world and their struggle for recognition and treatment.

Thriving with cancer. Survival doesn’t have to be a cancer patient’s only goal, and feeling overwhelmed doesn’t have to describe what it’s like to go through treatment. Focusing on one’s purpose and goals can make every day more manageable. Conscientious planning can help to lower anxiety, boost overall well-being, and even make room for moments that are full of life’s exuberance. This audiobook tackles personal and family issues that aren’t often raised by medical professionals and shines a light on what matters most: experiences that give life meaning and purpose.